Britannica Dictionary definition of ART. 1. [noncount] : something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings.
Bencher: An individual who takes photographs of graffiti. The term originated in New York when the graffiti writers and non-graffiti writers would sit on benches at train stations waiting for the trains to go by to take pictures and admire graffiti. Glossary of graffiti from Wikipedia.
Putting aside the question of What is Art and who gets to define it? for a while, something has been happening to blank city walls almost everywhere. I don’t mean graffiti-like Summer in the Granary, below, which is from a different tradition; I mean much more traditional painting, possibly commissioned and probably with an actual permit. I saw my first exterior wall painting – for lack of a better descriptor – in 1976, in Palo Alto, of all places. There were several – eventually, nine – approximately life-size figures painted on walls around town. Two I remember were an alien in a flying saucer crashed into a bank wall and two burglars escaping down the side of a building. This was before Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley and the figures seemed cute and wholesome.
Except for that, I don’t really remember any street art until I was driving by some wall paintings on 6th Street in San Francisco. They had already been defaced but I was instantly attracted – for lack of a better word – to it. Now I see wall art everywhere. Well, maybe not everywhere but almost everywhere, all over Paris, even Elko Nevada. Salt Lake City is full of Street Art and proud of it. Especially in the Granary District where we were staying, all we had to do is walk out the front door and wander the long way through the neighborhood on our way to getting coffee.
We ended our wall painting walk trying to guess the various luminaries at the SLC Pepper wall painting (with life-size figures). This remake by Jan Haworth, who collaborated on the original Beatles’ Sgt Pepper cover, features a lot more women and people of color. It was paid for by Zions Bank for us to enjoy.
I love this stuff. It is definitely art. Artists have painting on buildings-as long as there have been buildings. Cave art, chapel ceilings, Bavarian hotels and restaurants. These are every bit as much art as it comes.
Extraordinary technical skills are shown in your photos. I’d bet some of the artists are frustrated cartoonists, others perhaps highly paid pros delighting in a larger canvas. Everything you show is worlds away from the scrawls and ugly graffiti on too many trains and walls. In the UK, an anonymous artist who calls
himself Banksy has become a hero, and his work is valued highly in $$$.
I was thinking about Banksy when I read the blog.
No Banksys in Salt Lake…yet.
We ran into a Banksy in Paris, I think that it is the only one I’ve seen in real life.
Street art is a wonderful recent development. My favourite in London is Stik, a formerly homeless man whose work now sells in top auction houses. Here’s a link, maybe you can tell me which US city has one of his murals. http://stik.org/