Street art is an art form that entails creating public works incorporating the street physically and in their meaning. That physical property is employed as an artistic resource in street art raises two questions. Are street artworks necessarily illegal? Does being illegal change the nature of production and aesthetic appreciation? First, I argue street artworks must be in the street. On my view, both the physical and sociocultural senses of the street can be constitutive of meaning. Second, I argue that (...) illegality is a prototypical and paradigmatic feature of street art. While illegality alone does not make works better than sanctioned street art, it affects the production process and changes what is available to appreciate. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically discuss Riggle’s definition of street art. I argue that his definition has important limitations, and is therefore unsuccessful. I show that his view obscures a defining feature of street art, that is, its subversive power. As a significant consequence of ignoring that essential aspect, Riggle is incapable of fully understanding how street art transforms public space by turning one corner of the city at the time into contested ground. I also suggest that, when appreciating street (...) art's subversiveness, its challenge against the Modern separation of art and life appears more radical than Riggle foresees. (shrink)

Street art has exploded: it pervades our back alleys, surrounds us at bus-stops, covers billboards, competes with advertising and generally serves as urban wallpaper in most cities. But what is street art? A far cry from mere graffiti, street art has gained some social acceptance, but it remains neither officially sanctioned like public art, nor institutionally condoned, like its more traditional artistic cousins in museums. Somewhere in between these two extremes, street art has emerged, occupying a metaphysically suspect grey area (...) between illegal activity and bona fide art. This paper explores the nature of this emerging art form and draws out some of the differences between street art, public art and ‘mere’ graffiti. (shrink)

I argue that activists have co-opted street art as a tool for addressing epistemic injustices, injustices that result from negative identity prejudices that silence certain groups of people unfairly. To defend this claim, I explore the special nature of street art that makes it an especially appropriate tool for activists to enlist in the fight against epistemic injustices. From there, I will examine in detail two case studies which illustrate how street art is used to respond to and correct for (...) these injustices: first, the street art series, “Stop Telling Women to Smile” by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, and then Chris Metzger’s Inside Out Project in Baltimore. Drawing on these examples, I highlight the features in virtue of which street art constitutes a particularly effective tool for correcting epistemic injustices. (shrink)

To the person unfamiliar with the wide variety of street art, the term “street artist” conjures a young man furtively sneaking around a decaying city block at night, spray paint in hand, defacing concrete structures, ears pricked for police sirens. The possibility of the ethical criticism of street art on such a conception seems hardly worth the time. This has to be an easy question. Street art is vandalism; vandalism is causing the intentional damage or destruction of someone else’s property; (...) causing destruction or damage is wrong. The only remaining question is which of two coarse-grained models of ethical criticism we choose. The ethicist model holds that a work of art that exhibits ethically bad properties is a work that is thereby aesthetically flawed. That is, the work is flawed as a work of art just because of its ethical flaws. Bad ethics make art worse than it otherwise would have been, although it may be aesthetically successful otherwise. The autonomist model, by contrast, holds that the ethical properties of a work of art have no bearing at all on its aesthetic success. One might suppose, therefore, that on either model, a criticism of street art would be relatively easy to undertake. In defacing public property, some street art exhibits and endorses ethically bad attitudes. On the ethicist model, such a work is thereby pro tanto aesthetically flawed because in the process of creating such works, they violate ethical norms concerning the use of public spaces; on the autonomous model, any ethical criticism of the aesthetics of street art would need to be set aside entirely in favor of criticism that focused purely on the aesthetic properties of street art. I will argue in this paper that neither the ethicist nor the autonomist model adequately captures the moral landscape of street art. Street art may indeed be criticized productively on aesthetic grounds for the destruction it does to public spaces, but the existing models of ethical criticism overlook the complex ethical landscape of street art that results from its use of public spaces. In the interplay of various forms of street art we can see the emergence of an ethical criticism of art that is accomplished by the material properties of related artwork, and consists in the creation of a dialogue over the proper use of contested public spaces. (shrink)

This paper explores the «nature» of street art, highlighting its innovative features, the new socio-political status, and the differences between this emerging art form and dominant trends in contemporary visual art. This examination builds on the premise that artistic phenomena can only be considered from a critical perspective that situates questioning within a historical and specific gaze. Therefore, my aim is not to place this art movement within categorial boundaries, identifying the necessary and eternally true characteristics of street art, but (...) to identify the motives and tendencies that constitute it as a movement that runs against the dominant orientations in contemporary art. Building on this comparative analysis, the construens part of this paper explores the salient features of street art more thoroughly and more extensively, through an examination of the works of certain street artists. (shrink)

I reply to Andrea Baldini's critical discussion of my "Street Art: The Transfiguration of the Commonplaces" (2010) by taking up the question: what is "the street" in street art? I argue that the relevant notion of the street is a space whose function it is to facilitate self-expression. I show how this clarifies and extends the theory developed in Riggle (2010). I then argue, contra Baldini, that street art is not always subversive, and when it is, it is not always (...) in virtue of its challenging the co-opting of public space by commercial art. (shrink)

This article explores a concept of artistic transgression I call aesthetic disobedience that runs parallel to the political concept of civil disobedience. Acts of civil disobedience break some law in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a conflict between the commitments of a legal system and some shared commitments of a community. Likewise, acts of aesthetic disobedience break some entrenched artworld norm in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a conflict (...) between artworld commitments and some shared commitments of a community. Considering artistic transgressions under the concept of aesthetic disobedience highlights often-overlooked features of modern artworld practices. Most significantly, it draws attention to the deliberative participation of a wide variety of citizens of the artworld, including not just artists and performers but also members of audiences, in the transformation of the rules and boundaries of the artworld itself. (shrink)

According to Arthur Danto, post-modern or post-historical art began when artists like Andy Warhol collapsed the Modern distinction between art and everyday life by bringing “the everyday” into the artworld. I begin by pointing out that there is another way to collapse this distinction: bring art out of the artworld and into everyday life. An especially effective way of doing this is to make street art, which, I argue, is art whose meaning depends on its use of the street. I (...) defend this definition and show how it handles graffiti and public art. (shrink)