Felipe Bento Oliveira

Professor Christopher Roebuck

USA 270-01
10/22/2014
Make people stop to reflect on the art of street exposed. Make people think about politics,
religion, current events, making people laugh. As stated in the article: "The street work can be an
intervention, the collaboration, the commentary, the dialogic critique, an individual or collective
manifesto [...]" (p.3). People nowadays are always rushing. The go to work in your car or
walking fast through the streets and street art makes people slow down. The think and reflect
about art placed in a strategic location. According to Martin Irvine, "The pieces can be
ephemeral, gratuitous acts of beauty or forms of counter-iconography, inhabiting spaces of
abandonment and decay, or signal jams in a zone of hyper-commercial messaging." Street art has
the power to transform an ordinary place into something special. It is present in common
locations. But it fails to be common after receiving a work of art. The article cites as examples
the mall, the airport, Starbucks, big box stores (p.5). "The placement of works is often a call to
place, marking locations with awareness, over against the proliferating urban non-places of
anonymous transit and commerce []." (p.5).
Street art has been discriminated against by artists trained in art school. But currently
many artists trained in art schools recognize the value of street art. They also started using the
streets to create art. This shows that street art has gained recognition from students of art schools.
The author adds, "Critics, curators, theorists and scholars now routinely discuss the art forms that
are post-secondary, post-studio and post-institutional, precisely the starting point of street art."
(p.4). Art schools still do not recognize the street art, as an art to be taught in schools. As the
article states, "[] most art school programs continue an academic platform invested in playing

out some remaining possibilities in a postmodern remix of Performance Art, Conceptual Art,
Appropriation Art, Institutional Critique, and conceptual directions in photography, film, and
digital media." (p.4). But students of art schools are going to the streets to create his works along
with the old artists who already used the streets. Creating a network of street performers in 2000.
the author wrote, "A new generation of art school-educated artists heard the call and joined the
ranks of those already on the ground; they combined punk and hip-hop attitude with learned
skills and knowledge of recent art movements. By 2000, street artists had formed a global urban
network of knowledge and practice disseminated by proliferating websites, publications, and
collective nomadic projects. (p.3).
The film Exit Through The Gift Shop shows the evolution of street art. It was originally
something despised by most but always had a goal. The goal could be to express an opinion,
make people reflect or simply to make people laugh. As an example of works, the red phone
booth, modified frames with pictures of famous and other works were show. The film was shown
at two art exhibitions and both were a success. The first showed that television crews were
filming the event, showing the importance and the recognition that the works were gaining. The
second event showed the great interest of the people, as many people came to visit the exhibition
and many works were bought. The exhibition made a profit of one million dollars. At the end of
the video it was clear that street art has gained recognition from people. It is now recognized as a
form of art. The expression of opinion is creative works and that depends on the talent of the
artist.

REFERENCES:
Irvine, M. 2012. The Handbook of Visual Culture. Ed, Barry Sandywell and Ian
Heywood. London & New York: Berg.
Cushing, H. D'Cruz, J. Gay-Rees, J. Banksy. 2010. Exit Through The Gift Shop. United
Kingdom: Paranoid Pictures.