The business of urban coolness: Emerging markets for street art

Abstract

Street art gradually evolved from an activity that normally involves the illegal defacement of property to an established and highly legitimate art form. It has also followed in the footsteps of other countercultural art movements where mainstreaming has been coupled with commercialization, which in turn is understood to progressively erode the integrity of this art form. The article explores how recent developments in digital media created a new ecology for the commercialization of street art as an important genre of urban counterculture. It examines the various ways in which contemporary street art has been commodified including its use in fashion design, city branding, guerrilla marketing campaigns, as tourist attraction in alternative city tours, and whether these developments challenge the countercultural aspirations of street art. The central argument is that despite various forms of commercialization, street art remains an incompletely commodified and quintessentially interstitial practice that combines urban transgressive cultural activity, legitimate art and commercial design, thus continuing to traverse the boundaries of these fields. The analysis identifies three key processes that underlie the incomplete and fragmented commodification of street art: 1) the emergence of multiple, intersecting markets, and strategies to decouple commercial from non-commercial practices; 2) mass merchandising techniques as vehicles to democratize art; 3) the ambivalence of the artwork once it is reproduced primarily through photographs.