07 8 / 2012
Example: All the “street art,” commissioned by Open Walls Baltimore (sponsored by PNC Bank), being strategically placed in areas undergoing gentrification so the white yuppies/punx/MICA students from suburbia can exist in a hipster bubble and pretend they’re living somewhere dangerous while they displace everyone and drive up rent.
Destroy all artists/hipsters/future yuppies.
Fuck street art.
If I get around to it sometime this week I think I’ll try to write something longer addressing how problematic, counter-revolutionary, and frankly, liberal, statements such as “Destroy all artists” and “Fuck street art” are. For now, however, I just want to say I’m really fucking tired of people equating artists with yuppies. Yes, some artists are yuppies but you cannot just negate the fact that art objects are still just commodities within the dictatorship of Capital. Also, equating all artists with yuppies only works as an erasure of the entire history of art which is inseparable from the entire history of human existence. Fuck PNC and all banks for that matter. But with the commodification of street art, shit like this is going to happen. The question that arises though, with art projects like this would you rather have a message of subversion against capitalism (and the gentrification created by the capitalist system) planted by the artist with this commodity of gentrification, or just another fucking boring mural?
Destroy all yuppies.
Destroy all banks.
Destroy capitalism.
Art, however, is and always will be inseparable from human existence.
Capitalism contains within it the seeds of it’s own destruction. The same theory applies to the art market as it does with all industries.
ok this is a little better but lol @ Tru Art being *~subversion~* of capital
i mean good point w/ all art (object or not) being “just commodities within the dictatorship of capital”
OP is dumb as heck but graffiti (“street art” being only a cultural position migration of the form) regardless of the whatever the artists program is, is always a reactionary aesthetic form, if only because of the medium
basically lefties need to quit with the fetishism of the idea and finally recognize that both program and aesthetic are important for ~~~revolutionary art~~~
spacebaw knows more about politicized aesthetics than like 99% of the people on Tumblr/that I’ve ever met
