Our lectures
UNDERSTANDING STREET ART
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In the 60’s, tactics such as performance or land art allowed artists to break free from the conventions of art. This same urge brought about experiments we now would call street art.
Most approaches and techniques of street art were explored by artists in the 60’s and 70’s.
Street art as a movement took shape in the 80’s, from the convergence of contemporary art with advertising, graffiti and punk.
The popularity of street art waned in the late eighties, and most local scenes vanished with it. The nineties saw little activity in general. The main exceptions were Revs and Shepard Fairey, two very different but equally influential artists.
The monumental and visionary work developed by Revs and Fairey in the nineties laid the first foundations of what street art would become in the next decade.
By the start of the 21st century, the internet resurrected street art, now as a closely connected global scene. This lecture examines the keys to understanding street art in its blossoming years.
Its techniques, its ethics, its shifting tastes and audiences, and its conflictive relation with graffiti. Also its strategies, from quasi-advertising campaigns to site-specific interventions, from inconspicuous pieces to large works painted with pole and roller.
The irruption of institutional murals in the 2010’s caused a radical shift in the idea of ’street art’. Smaller, ephemeral works lost their prominence in the collective imaginary, blinded by the impact of monumental formats.
This lecture makes use of this contrast to discover and study the hidden mechanisms that make uncommissioned street art a unique art form. In particular its contextual and temporal dimensions, and its relation with human scale.
Street art and society interrelate in paradoxical ways. Street art operates in a limbo between activism and advertising. Society represses street art with one hand and exploits it with the other.
This lecture covers the main topics studied in our course “Street Art, Society and Politics”. Surprising practices such as artivism and ‘buff’ art, thorny issues such as appropriation and gentrification, and the problematic transition from the street to the gallery.