Graffiti, street art and the dialects of the city / Jeff Ferrell -- Art or crime or both at the same time? On the ambiguity of images in public space / Alison Young -- Reading between the [plot] lines : framing graffiti as multimodal practice / Samantha Edwards-Vandenhoek -- Interviewing walls : towards a method of reading hybrid surface inscriptions / Sabina Andron -- Graffiti, street art and the democratic city / Kurt Iveson -- Street art is a period, PERIOD : or, classificatory confusion and intermural art / Rafael Schacter -- Expressive measures : an ecology of the public domain / Andrea Mubi Brighenti -- Dead ends and urban insignias : writing graffiti and street art (hi)stories along the UN buffer zone in Nicosia, 2010-2014 / Panos Leventis -- The December 2008 uprising's stencil images in Athens : writing or inventing traces of the future? / Stavros Stavrides -- Repetitive repertoires : how writing about Cairene graffiti has turned into a serial monotony / Mona Abaza -- Sao Paulo's pixacʹao and street art : representations of or responses to Brazilian modernism? / Alexander Lamazares -- Defensible aesthetics : creative resistance to urban policies in Ottawa / Deborah Landry -- #Instafame : aesthetics, audiences, data / Lachlan MacDowall -- Representations of graffiti and the city in the novel El Francotirador Paciente : readings of the emergent urban body in Madrid / Stephen Luis Vilaseca -- Long live the tag : representing the foundations of graffiti / Gregory J. Snyder.
Summary:
Graffiti and street art have captured a global following in recent years, and the result is a proliferation of tags, paintings, stickers and stencils in slick metropolitan cities as well as unexpected locales in impoverished areas. Part of their appeal is that the forms allow viewers an understanding of the subtext of a city without resorting to mainstream accounts, or official histories. They offer an alternative history; a mapping of social trails or subcultural behaviours - a voyeuristic pleasure at entering the story of the city. In essence, the proliferation of pieces democratises the relationship between art and its audiences as it generates an open gallery, allowing the free enjoyment of skill of practitioners. As such, they provide a counter-narrative to the hyper-capitalist urban aesthetic. This ground-breaking book is the first systematic collection of critical scholarly works that explore issues related to contemporary urban public writing. It offers context-sensitive case studies from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Russia and Brazil, among others, grounded in different social, cultural and urban settings in order to highlight how this global phenomenon is localised and how local practices contribute to the perpetuation of the global scene.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.