Is street art dead?

I've finally become the dirty hipster technocrat that I always despised. Sitting outside a coffee shop in the Long Beach Arts District, blogging from my phone after choosing an environmentally sound means of travel, I feel as though I may have succumbed to the model sold to me by the powers that be.

Good art stirs action and provokes new thought. In the wake of Basquiat and Banksy, how many more messages about media thought control can provoke new thought? Any art medium which has already experienced a wave of self referential mockery (in the form of Mr. Brainwash and others) may have run it's course.

Reclusive street artist JR was in Long Beach this week speaking at the yearly TED conference. His topic: using art to provoke individual social change though community participation.



This idea was most successfully used by the mid-twentieth century Bauhaus movement, which has provided us bland, usable cities populated with nondescript and dehumanizing office buildings. Proof that the idea is powerful and can be a force for social change.

Infusing a preexisting art form with new ideas may just save it from itself.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7