Changes in Metropolitan Aesthetics Caused by the Phenomenon Of

Changes in metropolitan aesthetics caused by the phenomenon of street and grafﬁti arts - the varie- ties, history and the negative and positive impact on the 21st century’s society

Table of contents:

1. Abstract.

2. The expansion of visual arts into the city’s structures through street-art and grafﬁti arts.

-Urbanisation and the expansion of street-art and grafﬁti. -Different approach on the legality of these arts.

3. The multiplicity of types of street-art and grafﬁti.

-The difference between these two forms of modern visual arts. -Methodology of their types.

4. The origins of different street-art and grafﬁti forms.

-Etymology -Street art’s connection to wall paintings in the prehistoric and historic eras. -Typographical influence as the main root of graffiti art. -The extraction of street-art and graffiti from other art forms in the 20th century.

5. Optical and perceptional changes of the metropolitan aesthetics due to the phenomenon.

-The inﬂuence of colours in human perception caused by the phenomenon of visual arts on the streets. -Metropolitan architecture’s perception and the negative and positive affection of the mentioned above art’s forms. -Political and ideological messages involved into the state of these arts. -Synthesis of street-art and grafﬁti with modern culture, digital forms of art, and they affect on the society.

6. Ending statement - the ambiguity of the phenomenon and the overall impact on the metropolitan environment.

-Authors comment.

7. Bibliography and sources of images.

1.Abstract

As a humans living in the 21st century we are all exposed to the environment which surrounds us, which in fact is a highly complex synthesis of the natural and human creation that seems to be existing in some form of balance between them. The demography of our planet seems to be tending towards the concentra- tion of human masses due to the urbanisation and globalisation phenomenas that occur in the present. According to the „2014 revision of the World Urbanisation Prospects” by The Department of Economic and Social Affairs of United Nations the urbanisation process is rapidly growing in the 21st century, with mega-cities (more than 10 million occupants) increasing in numbers all over the globe, small cities growing rapidly and rural populations being expected to decrease in numbers. 1 All those metropolises are places where a lot of human activities are hap- pening and the pace of life is much faster as the perception is exposed to so many more incentives. The biggest part of perception, for the inhabitants of metropolis is the architecture and design surrounding them also internal as external. The complexity of these architectural designs that big cities consist of is very wide and includes all forms of human creation with different purposes (usable, commercial, decorative) . All that creation as a part of the overall urban environment has a heavy impact on the society occupying the city. On what this article will focus is the phenomenon of visual arts appearing in the public spaces of metropolises, commonly called street-art or graffiti, and their influence on the aesthetics, society, as well as their positive and negative si- des and their historical background. It is an objectively new occurrence in the history of art and humanity, being one of the most modern art forms as well as the most public one. Street-art and graffiti arts due to their conflict with law, freedom of expression and maximalist approach have become very popular in modern metropolitan societies and their impact on the aesthetics is easily noticed. The article intends to help the reader to understand these phenomenas as well as categori-

1 http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/publications/2014-revision-world-urbanization-prospects.html

se and describe them. It also aims to clarify the origins and inﬂuence of these modern-day forms of art as well as to point out their negative and positive impact on the society.

2. The expansion of visual arts into the city’s structures through street and grafﬁti arts.

As mentioned before it is not possible to not notice the occurrence of street- art and graffiti in the metropolitan space as it’s forms permeated over a large va- riety of architectural and mechanical structures. The most commonly painted surfaces are city’s walls which are probably the only spaces able to host paintings of such enormous sizes, but it also reaches other kinds of surfaces such as public transportation means (trains, subway, buses), all of the city’s infrastructure parts , monuments, billboards, road signs as well as private property such as trucks, fences or elevations. Basically we could say that these two forms of art try to paint and write over everything that’s surrounding us. That proves of the expansional character of those activities but also it shows a synthetic approach of the artists trying to fill some kind of gaps in the architectural design in which they exist and express themselves that way. So what can we say about the scale of the that occurrence ? „As graffiti hit the 21st century the scene seemed to explo- de, particularly with urban and street artists that had begun their graffiti journey back in the 1990’s.” 2Says Steve Gray in an article written for the Widewalls magazine, and it is true, surely we can notice the growth in numbers of street-art and graffiti paintings over the last few years practically everywhere in the world, and considering the prognoses of the urbanisation process it seems to extend itself even more creating a new aesthetics of the metropolises.

2 https://www.widewalls.ch/graﬃti-hits-the-21st-century/

A great example of such street-art expansion process is the history of Phi- ladelphia’s Mural Art Program starting in 1984 by artist Jane Golden3 turning Philadelphia into one of the most decently painted cities with thousands of colourful murals. The outcomes of this project lead the society to a better balance of the life in the city and it’s suburbs, rise the employment rate, tourism and have pro- ven financially beneficial. The story of this project is a great example on how the expressive, artistic human energies under the correct program can turn out good for the society. On the other hand extremely big amounts of money are being spent on the graffiti removal.

„In 2005, the cost of criminal damage Australia wide, which included but was not limited to grafﬁti vandalism, was estimated to be $1.58 billion annually” .4

The legality of these phenomenas was always their biggest problem, as it was always up to the artist’s intention, especially when he wanted to reach a large group of recipients for his message or just to become more famous as many graffiti artists do by writing their nicknames in enormous size on public walls. In different countries there are different penalties for graffiti offences, but the main idea is that if someone does it without permission it is illegal. Every cause is of different weight according to the scale of damage. That’s by law, but theoretically if an object is just painted but still can fulfil it’s functions it is not destroyed so even being illegal it mostly doesn’t really do something that bad from an ethical point of view. Taking a closer look we can notice thats it is all about the flow of the society’s expressionistic energy through the artistic medium of painting. Basically the bigger the society is the bigger scale these phenomenas have and the bigger the impact they create back on the society.

3. The multiplicity of forms of street-art and grafﬁti.

3 Jane Golden, Robin Rice, Natalie Pompilio: More Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell". Temple University. Retrieved November 14, 2006.

4 3. Rollings K 2008. Counting the costs of crime in Australia: a 2005 update. Research and public policy series no. 91. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology.

At first we need to point out that graffiti and street-art is not the same, these two terms refer to different forms of art. Graffiti is more letter-based, typographical form concentrated on the use of spray paint and rollers, also much more criminally related, having it’s own non-written rules, while Street-Art is more to- lerant, illustrative, less conflictual and refers more to traditional ways of painting (like fresco5) and mixed media as an artistic expression. Both of these forms take place in the public spaces but their aesthetic effects are quite different as a result of other tools and materials used in the creation process. Graffiti artists basically use spray cans, markers, squeezers6 and more writing-based tools while street artists prefer to use facade paints, stencils, wheat paste posters, brushes and rollers but also spray paints. Graffiti artists commonly form so called crews while street-artists tend to be more individual but also creating collaborative artistic collectives for productions of bigger scale. Street art is more focused on the idea of creating a visual content of more illustrative character often a narration or abstraction. It also uses typography mainly to pass a message related to the artwork. We can differ these main techniques of street-art: the mural, the stencil, a wall-written text, wheat paste posters and stickers. Street art includes more backend studio work than graffiti art, especially when it comes to stencils and wheat paste posters. Some researchers call street-art a „post-graffiti” form of art that evolved from graffiti itself. And it may be true, in fact street-art tends to cover the illegal forms of graffiti art which most of the people don’t find visually acceptable. Graffiti on a bigger scale is much more criminally related, often seen as vandalism and oscillates around an ideological movement of writing a name or a message. It is deeply connected to exposing an identity of an artist or a group of artists called crews or passing a message to the society . There is a strict code of unwritten rules applying to graffiti art created by the community and it is based

5 The method of painting frescoes, used in Roman times and by the great masters of the Italian Renaissance including Giotto, Ra- phael, and Michelangelo. en.oxforddictionaries.com

6 Squeezer: Marker with body in squeezable plastic and tip in thick very wide fabric, which is used to make tags with sagging, re- chargeable with inks also buﬀ proof. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossario_del_graﬃtismo

on respect, experience and controversy, as well as style and uniqueness and there are certain rules concerned to covering other’s paintings. In addition the term graffiti writer is more often used in communities related to the subject rather than graffiti artist, and that is a relation to the typographic nature of the art form(and the writer term will be used later on in the article). The technique mainly used by graffiti writers is painting with a spray paint and the motives are the fictional nickname of the writer or the crew focused mainly on the letters. Charac- ters and narrations as well as abstractive forms also appear in some artworks but the main concept of it is to be always letter-based. So graffiti depicts itself in different ways starting from tags, throw-ups, pieces, train-writing, bombing, Pichação, and ending with graffiti-jams, (reminiscent of street-art’s murals). Both of these art forms probably have to do more with the modern performance arts than we could think of, as in the era of cameras and social media these graffiti writers and street artists tend to share with the public the recordings of their painting actions, exposing the performance as an act of art to the audience.7 There also exist other forms of graffiti, connected to the football clubs and their fans phenomenon, but mainly most of them have very little to do with art, so they will be referred as a purely negative aspect of the side and not counted as art form in this article. Beneath we can find a more complex explanation of the methodology used above to point out the techniques and kinds of actions performed by artists related to the subject. I’ d like to mention also that the motives vary from the artist but the techniques are quite the same for all.

Methodology:

Street-art:

- Sticker - a pre-made sticker placed in the public space.

7 Hughes, Melissa L., "Street Art & Graﬃti Art: Developing an Understanding." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2009. h ps://scho- larworks.gsu.edu/art_design_theses/50

1.With the support of street art enthusiast and 2.This is the ﬁfth in a serious of occasional Fridge Gallery founder and curator Alex Gold- posts documenting the range of stickers — stein, iwillnot curated a 12.5 feet tall by 20 feet from the playful to the political — that surface wide 10,000 sticker installation in 2013. By on NYC public spaces. The one pictured abo- 2016, the entire gallery was smashed with ve by Rx Skulls was spotted on the Lower hundreds of thousands of stickers, represen- East Side. ting over 500 artists from 15 countries. http://streetartnyc.org/blog/2017/02/09/nyc- http://streetartnyc.org/blog/2018/07/30/on- sticker-art-part-v-chris-rwk-k-nor-todd-colby- smashed-the-art-of-the-sticker-combo-by- nany-coy-bines-rae-bk-and-more/ iwillnot/

- Stencil / cutout - a technique using an pre-made cut out stencil and a spray paint to create a painting in a very small time partition.

3.The father of stencil graffiti, Xavier Prou was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, a commune in the western suburbs of Paris in 1951. He studied fine art and architecture at the prestigious École Des Beaux Arts in Paris, graduating in 1982. Before his graduation, Prou visited New York and developed a fascination with the city’s street art. Inspired by the NYC graffiti, he returned to France and began his artistic career in 1981 by painting stencils of rats. What he did that no one artist in France had was the utilization of pre- stenciled posters and images allowing the applica- tion of paint to be a lot speedier, mostly because he didn’t want to stay a long time on the streets because of the police.

http://streetartnyc.org/blog/2014/10/28/stencil-art- pioneer-blek-le-rat-at-the-quin-and-on-nyc-streets/

- Wall written message - a message for others left by the author, commonly political or

ideological.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/dec/03/words-on-the-street-graﬃti-of-the-paris-protests-in-pictures

4,5. As the cleanup operation conti- nues across across the French capi- tal after violent demonstrations against rising taxes and the high cost of living, the messages left behind reveal some of the motives and emotions behind the unrest.

- Wheat paste posters - studio made works of art, sticked with wheat paste into the pu-

blic space.

6. SWOON is a street artist from New York City who specialises in life-size wheat-paste prints and paper cutouts of ﬁgures. Swoon, real name Caledonia “Callie” Dance Curry, studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999.

http://www.isupportstreetart.com/artist/swoon/

- Mural - a narrative, illustrative or abstract painting of enormous size in the public

space.

7.Natalia Rak's 'The Legend of the Giants’ Łódź Poland. 8.Remed „Od pustki do życia” („From emptiness to life”) Wrocław Poland. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/bigger-than-banksy-polish-street-art- goes-large/index.html Mural Art vol.2 by Kiriakos Iosiﬁdis - Murals on huge public surfaces around the world from Graﬃti to tromp l’oei Publikat (November 30, 2009)

Grafﬁti:

- Tag - a quick signature/text in the public space. The earliest form of modern day grafﬁ-

ti.

9.Tags adorn a lock-up garage in the Melbourne suburb of Balaclava. By ABC News: Allissa Oughtred.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-04/the-art-of-graﬃti- tagging/6959396

- Throw-up - a quick wall painting consisting of letter’s forms and (or) characters.

10.Rime MSK

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/ 225320787578429122/

11. Cope2 Downtown Los Angeles 2012

http://myaccidentaldiscoveries.com/cope2s-wall/

- Piece - a name or crew lettering painted on the wall (can consist characters also).

12.Piece of the Day grafﬁti video featuring 123klan and TMRC

" Dot Kom " concept by Scien and Mrs Klor.

https://www.123klan.com/blogs/news/piece-of- the-day-new-grafﬁti-video-featuring-123klan- and-tmrc

- Train-writing - painting grafﬁti (rarely street-art) on trains.

13,14.This couple broke probation to go on a worldwide tagging spree. But living on the run, chased from country to country, has taught them the true meaning of independence.

Utah & Ether: The Bonnie and Clyde of grafﬁti The outlaw artists

https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/utah-ether-bonnie-and-clyde-of-grafﬁti/

- Bombing (slang) - illegally painting on any surface.

15.https://www.spraydaily.com/bombing- in-black-and-white-by-uciekinier/ 16.When she's not off on a movie set, jetsetting around the world to Spain and other exotic destinations or writing for her Goop website, Gwyneth Paltrow can be see beating around town in this fabulous graffiti truck. http://quiteallright.blogspot.com/2010/07/gwyneth-paltrows-graffiti-truc- k.html

- Pichação - Sao Paulo’s native grafﬁti form basing on climbing into most visible and ex- treme spots in the city’s infrastructure. It have also expanded recently to Europe and can be seen in Berlin and other metropolis.

16,17. Sao Paulos angry alternative to graﬃti - The Guardian Magazine.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/jan/06/pixacao-the-story-behind-sao-paulos-angry-alternative-to-graﬃti 10

- Graffiti jams - mainly done legally with a permission and preparation they are a graffiti writers and street artists meetings for creating a production of a very large scale, like a huge building wall. The outcomes of such meetings may be often mixed with street-art, but the graffiti paintings is more letter based commonly it is a synthesis of different names, characters and motives.

18.The 22nd annual Under Pressure international graﬃti festival in Montréal was going down from August 9-13, 2017.

https://www.123klan.com/blogs/news/video-graﬃti-123klan-under- pressure-2017

4. The origins of street-art and grafﬁti forms.

The opinions about the origins of these two modern art forms are dived.

Some seek them in the ancient times with an archeological approach, comparing the street paintings of today to Palaeolithic cave paintings or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics while others tend to seek the beginning in the records of signatures written on the walls in human history. The etymology of the word grafﬁti can help understand the nature of it’s history.

The Oxford English Dictionary deﬁnes grafﬁti as:

“Writings or drawings that have been scribbled, scratched or sprayed illicitly on a wall or other surface in a public place.”

And dates it back to: Mid 19th century: from Italian (plural), from grafﬁo ‘a scrat- ch’.

„In Italian the word grafﬁti is a plural noun and its singular form is grafﬁto.”8

But considering the typographical inﬂuence that grafﬁti is all about we could state that the deeper roots of the word reach the Proto-Hellenic word *grəpʰō 9(γράφω / grafo) meaning - to write but also to draw sketch or paint.

20.’People of China, rise and drive out the Japanese bandits!' Japanese soldier looks at anti- Japanese graﬃti in Chinese city, February 1938.

https://www.scoopnest.com/user/chinaww2/959752194672201728--people-of-rise-and-drive-out-the- japanese-bandits-japanese-soldier-looks-at-anti-japanese-graﬃti-in-chinese-city-february-1938

8 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/deﬁnition/graﬃti

9 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/γράφω

The term street-art on the other hand is deﬁned by the Oxford English Dictionary as:

Artwork that is created in a public space, typically without ofﬁcial permission.10

Street-art although is etymologically a newer word synthesis estimating on the English meanings of the two words which also stands for the argument that it is a post-grafﬁti art.

But is really grafﬁti a modern art form? Or was it there from the beginnings of humanity?

Surely, it was not the same due to the different civilisation’s progress stadiums but some interesting research done in 1976 in Athens by , Mabel Lang from the American School of Classical Studies catalogues over 800 examples of grafﬁti from ancient times and they date from the 8th century B.C. to the 6th century A.D.

As well as grafﬁti that identiﬁed ownership, there were also examples of mar- kings that were Christian inscriptions, dedications and even insults. 11

More and more scientists consider the phenomenon of what we call street-art or grafﬁti today to be an occurrence always accompanying humanity.

Sheffield University's Paul Pettitt, who discovered Britain's first example of palaeolithic art at Cresswell Crags, said most ancient art was too difficult to be simply doodles. "The images are often in areas that are hard to access," he said. "Conside- rable effort was put into these images. It wasn't just somebody bored on a Sunday.”12 Because in fact it is with the humanity from the beginning, we can find tho- usand of examples from all over the world and most of all historic periods from

10 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/deﬁnition/street_art

11 The Writing on the Wall – Graﬃti as Art, History and Politics, Tancia Ltd 2016 , page 3 &4.

12 16.https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/cave-paintings-are-graﬃti-by-prehistoric-yobs-6108231.html

Egyptian hieroglyphs to the renaissance’s frescos.Writings on the wall seem to be very politically afﬁliated as history proves. The big part of the origin of street-art and grafﬁti lies in the depression of people under military occupation in the times of wars. It was always a voice for the opposition, rebel-

19. All across the construction zone at the site of the World Tra- lion, trying to fight something and someone. de Center in Lower Manhattan, more than 20,000 square feet of There are many of particular examples of corrugated metal is being transformed by street artists. such behaviour and there is track kept of it https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/graffiti-rises-at-the-world- which if we take it under the magnifying trade-center-site/ glass will show us that the message type of street-art is deeply connected to drastic historical events such as occupations at World War II or fall of the World Trade Center. So even the fact that both of these art forms had been as long as humanity can remember, Street-art and graffiti art started to extract themselves from the painting tradition and became modern fields of art evolving from the revolutionary sub-culture to the culture and galleries thanks to the communities involved in them all over the world. As time passes by, Street Art and Graffiti Art develops their own history creating a new branch in the modern art history. I will mention some well known precursors of what we call today street art and graffiti for their big influence on the communities and it’s history. And we need to add that it is a living history not yet ended. The engraved writings and cave paintings was what we found left after our ancestors that lived thousands of years ago, below there are mentioned more recent examples of similar beha- viours. One of the precursors of graffiti is known as Taki 183: It was the 1960s that saw the rise of graffiti across entire cities, beginning with Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The first comparable example of graffiti in New York was seen in 1971, when the New York Times wrote an article about a young writer known as TAKI 183. As a messenger, TAKI 183, whose real name was De- metrius, travelled extensively across the subway system and his distinctive tag, written in Magic Marker, appeared over a large area. 183 referred to his native

183rd Street and TAKI was a nickname derivative of Demetrius. 13

13 The Writing on the Wall – Graﬃti as Art, History and Politics, Tancia Ltd 2016 , page 5.

In the 1970s, in New York, the phenomenon of graffiti seems to appear on a larger scale, escalating from wall writing to other parts of the metropolitan infrastructure depicting names such as: Duke Spirit Superkool Koolkiller Ace Vipere Spider Eddie Kola and so on, followed by their street number — Eddie 135 Woodie 110 Shadow 137. 14And it seems to be continuation of the trend started by TAKI 183. The French philosopher of sociology Jean Baudrillard in his article titled koolkiller says: One thing is certain: both the graffitists and the muralists sprang up after the re- pressions of the great urban riots of 1966–70. Like the riots, graffiti was a savage offensive, but of another kind, changing content and terrain. A new type of inte- rvention in the city, no longer as a site of economic and political power, but as a space-time of the terrorist power of the media, signs and the dominant culture. 15

And that also proves of the connection of art to revolutionary movements. Ano- ther, much darker origin of this art may lay in the gang culture of the 1920s and 1930s.

Some of the earliest examples of modern grafﬁti or tagging were seen in the 1920s when homeless men using the railroads in the United States would mark the boxcars as a record of their illegal journey. The ﬁrst examples of tagging by groups within a city were found amongst the Mexican-American communities in Los Angeles in the 1930s.16

But these two examples just happened in the right time to affect the history because the only thing connecting them with what we define as art today is the medium (marker, spray paint) and the gesture, the act. The above examples prove that both of the art forms have lots of origins and motives as well as sources differently conditioned but prove to be some kinds of mirrors reflecting unique personalities, social disapproval , ideological and political trends, artistic groups, visions of mind, abstractions, so basically they tend to reflect the society that flows through the metropolis and hits it back with the information stream, exposing the data to others by placing those depicted thoughts in the public space.

14 Kool Killer - Jean Baudillard www.lpdme.org /projects /jeanbaudrillard /koolkiller.zip page 8

15 Kool Killer - Jean Baudillard www.lpdme.org /projects /jeanbaudrillard /koolkiller.zip page 27.

16 The Writing on the Wall – Graﬃti as Art, History and Politics, Tancia Ltd 2016 , page 4.

5. Optical and perceptional changes of the metropolitan aesthetics due to the phenomenon.

The optical changes in the metropolitan aesthetics caused by the occurring visual arts phenomenons involve adding colours and shapes, but also stories and passing thoughts as text to the surroundings in this case mostly the metropolis’s architecture and infrastructure. There have been very deep researches about the influence of colours on humans and their affects that had been going on for ages. The ones surely needed to be mentioned, according to the psychological side of this research is the Colour Psychology study which is massively used by the eve- ryday seen public marketing and commercial campaigns manifesting themselves in the forms of posters, billboards and other creative visual objects. All that advertisement part of the infrastructure is exposed to the society without consul- ting it. So the society reacts with street-art and graffiti in order to keep the balance between the personal will and the will they have no impact on. Colour Psycho- logy studies have a very rich theoretical backgrounds and are based on physics, perception and neurology studies. This action-reaction process that seems to happen between the metropolitan society and the changing, surrounding them world with his architecture and infrastructure, advertising spaces and moving machines uses public space as a part of information stream affecting humans and terrorising them with images carrying different messages. The bases for the Co- lour Psychology studies lies deep in different civilisational traditions, so for the purpose of better understanding the subject I will refer to Goethe’s and Shiller’s work on colours and the archetypes of human personality known as sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic. Below we can find an image of a work made by the duet called the „rose of temperaments”. And moreover there is a chart with color meanings used in common marketing and commercials, with points out the influence of color on the recipient.

„Goethe created his version of a colour wheel and arranged the colours according to what he called their natural order. He also explored the impact of colours on emotions and attributed different qualities to certain colours. If you look

Goethe’s and Shiller’s Rose of Temperaments

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_Schiller_Die_Tem- peramentenrose.jpg

closely at the colour wheel, starting in the area with red and working down to yellow, you can see the word schön, which means beautiful; edel, which means noble; and gut, which means good. Each word corresponds to a section on the wheel. In Goethe's theory, yellow as the colour nearest to the light, was bright and exciting. It stood for good. Red stood for gravity, dignity and attractiveness or beauty. Blue, on the other hand, was powerful, but in a slightly negative way - creating a cold impression.”17 The chart below represents perceived meanings of different colours in the United States as based on a a book about marketing and colour’s inﬂuence18

17 20.https://study.com/academy/lesson/goethes-color-theory.html

18 Aslam, M.M (2006). "Are You Selling the Right Colour? A Cross-cultural Review of Colour as a Marketing Cue". Journal of Marke- ting Communications. 12 (1): 15–30.

Functional (F): fulﬁlls a need or solves a problem Sensory-Social (S): conveys attitudes, status, or social approval Violet/ Red Yellow Green Blue Pink Brown Black White Purple Compe- Good Sophisti- Rug- Happi- Lust Mascu- Authori- tence Taste cation gedness Grief (S) ness (S) line (S) ty (S) (S) (F) (S) (S) (S) Compe- Sophisti- Sophisti- Power Happi- Envy Sincerity Since- tence cation cation (S) ness (S) (S) (S) rity (S) (S) (S) (S) Exci- High Femini- Power Expensi- Purity tement quality ne (S) (S) ve (F) (S) (S) (F) Love Corpo- Fear (S) (S) rate (F)

Understanding the nature of colours and their meaning we can start explo- ring the different cases of street and graffiti art phenomenas in different metropolises. The next thing worth considering is the written message of those arts, the typographical influence so strongly noticed in these form of expression. But these kinds of input to the human perception is mainly clear, it does not hit the uncon- sciousness that much as the overall image with applied color changes that affirm to the general atmosphere of the place. The basic rules of the perception and the influence it makes back (we could call it feedback) is affected by the different social, politic, historical, ideological phenomenas standing in opposition to the commercial, unwanted advertisement campaigns and paid signs. The graffiti and street art scenes of each city is unique as must be if based on so many different elements, and this so proves again of the medium being a mirror of the state of the place. Good mural projects are making the city’s landscape interesting while trends according to football clubs fill the metropolitan infrastructure with purely looking tags carrying the name of their beloved club. It is a way of one human or group of humans through his/their work being able to influence another which seems to be there in the form that the society wants it. In fact it is all energy which flows through the city, if that energy is used rightfully and organised it will se- rve a good purpose and have a positive influence on the society as seen in the

example of Philadelphia’s Mural Art Program, and will tend to inspire individuals and communities, by the other hand if the mentioned before energy is guided wrongly by fanatics or extremist it will cause an effect nor artistic nor positive and will born negative emotions in the society. But as history shows it can also put a spark into the process of liberation of the society pushing it towards to epic acts of rebellion.

Another interesting phenomenon related to the subject of street and graffiti arts is the influence of social media in the era of smartphones and widespread in- ternet connections on different devices. The processing of images, videos and materials related with graffiti and street art contributes to the faster information transfer between the individuals and groups devoted to these art forms in conclu- sions leading to expanding it to other forms such as magazines, video-art, clo- thing and even the commercial advertisement industry affecting it’s assimilation from the underground, subculture to the mass culture, making it more familiar to the society and claiming it’s place in modern art galleries and shops.

6. Ending statement - the ambiguity of the phenomenon and the overall impact on the metropolitan environment.

The phenomenas concerned in this article prove to be ambiguous and unique, each related to a big amount of other phenomenas from different parts of life and from history as well as the current political and social events. It has a bright and a dark side depending on the factors mentioned above. However the form of the phenomenon itself, consciously analysed can become a mirror of the society’s state or useful historical substance for the future’s generations. As the process of

urbanisation of earth moves on, the art keeps expanding it’s ground taking over the streets in opposition to modern commercial advertisement and raw, cold infrastructure with it’s metal machines and concrete walls.

The overall impact that these two forms have on the metropolitan environment can be defined very easily - it changes the scenery, makes it more cu- stomised, colourful and human at the same time carrying a message for others. Treating the street like a canvas there is a renaissance of wall painting going on in the 21st’s century’s metropolises also affected by the development of advan- ced art supplies and social consciousness. The occurring phenomenas mentioned in the article above are concerning all of us, and maybe the better understanding of that topic will guide to these art forms’s purification, organising the society’s creative energies into something really positive and helping rather that destruc- tive and savage. As an author I found it as a really interesting experience spending my time upon this subject which fascinates me since when I was a kid. I would like to give thanks to mr. Dionisys Kabbathas for the acceptance of this topic (as I know much people would not let it) as final work for the seminar we are having on be- half of my attendance to the A.S.K.T Master in Digital Arts Studies Program.

6.02.2019

Written by Georgios Lazaridis

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