Observation on Street Art and Public Art or I <3 Nick Z

Disclaimer:  I am sure this theory is a wild over-generalization.  I like to make up assertions based on ridiculously small sample sets.  So admittedly this is more an entertaining exploration of ideas than a statement of fact.  But also know that do I tend to be right.  The beauty of being a blogger (career path number 7) rather than being an academic (career path number 3) being that you can be a little more irresponsible in sharing your thought processes.

Nick Z and Josh Falk, 2009

Given my fixation on street art, I been speculating that street art, and street art cum public art, tend to thrive during periods of economic difficulty.  Folk art (which has now generally morphed into street art) has always tended to be the voice of the (metaphorically if not literally) disenfranchised.  But during times of great economic stress, it becomes appropriated by the dominant vernacular.  And so what you get, is a proliferation of particularly good artistic production with roots and references in street art.  Looking at the turn of the century in the West, the avant-garde which challenged the established rules of artistic production, turned to folk art for a lot of its language.  It was the voice of a society in crisis, leading into and just following World War I.  With the Great Depression, Roosevelt turn to a heavy investment in public art as one channel for economic recovery and social inspiration.  The voice of the “masses” and their “language” were suddenly of much greater political significance.  But the appropriation of their artistic language by the institutions in power also becomes a way to control the masses.  Sending uplifting messages through public art based in the public vernacular, while in part a reflection of the increasing political significance of the general public, is also a way of controlling the population by using their language to reassure them that everything is or will be okay.  That is why it is also such a popular tool for authoritarian governments.  WPA art, Communist Art (under Stalin and in China), Fascist art and Nazi art, all look quite similar (perhaps the topic of my next post).

So it is perhaps not surprising that in our period of “is it a depression or a recession, wait is there going to be another recession, things are getting better, no they’re going to get a lot worse” and “the gap between the haves and the have nots is expanding in an ever more absurd fashion”, the confusion between street art and the art establishment should not come as a complete surprise.  And given the amount of confusion and tension inherent in this confrontation/assimilation, it should not be surprising that the work that emerges is particularly enticing and engaging.  Which brings me to a couple of my favorite contemporary artists (in other words, this topic of conversation is actually going to spread over a number of posts.

My husband and I discovered Nick Z (okay, and my in-laws, who are usually behind any of our great artistic discoveries) a number of years ago in a gallery in Boston.  Nick started as a graffiti artist (I’m sorry Nick if I get parts of the story wrong – I’m going off a very faulty memory here).  When he started displaying and selling work through galleries, it was almost like slicing out a chunk of graffiti and selling the resulting object.  Many of his works were spraypaint on wood.  Over time, Nick’s artistic language has become significantly more sophisticated, but it still remains strongly rooted in graffiti, as does how he displays his work.  He does some individual canvases, but also installations and wall murals.  And he has branched into commercial work, a part of the predominant blurring of the line between high art and the commercial use of art.  He participated in an artists’ collaboration with Pepsi, and his work is also now in the collection of Takashi Murakami (a fact which brings me no end of delight).  Nick still does paint on the sides of buildings and sells t-shirts off his own website.  His site – http://www.youlovenickz.com – is definitely worth checking out.  Meanwhile, my dream is to be able to afford to hire Nick one day to paint portraits of my kids on the walls of their rooms (see image of girl below which is a reproduction of a portrait Nick did for a client).

Nick Z @ OH&T Gallery, Boston, May 2008

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