A book I have been hearing about for some time now; so I’m excited to announce the launch of Alison Youngs labour of love Street Art, Public City.
“The book is the first full-length academic study of street art in Melbourne, New York, Berlin and Paris. The book draws on interviews with over 60 street artists and graffiti writers in cities around the world, and looks at the ways cities, police and councils respond to street artworks”.
This is a subject that I am very passionate about and spend much of my time on (working with councils etc) so I can’t wait to read this and hear what Alison has to say.
From the Readings website: “What is street art? Who is the street artist? Why is street art a crime? Since the late 1990s, a distinctive cultural practice has emerged in many cities: street art, involving the placement of uncommissioned artworks in public places. Sometimes regarded as a variant of graffiti, sometimes called a new art movement, its practitioners engage in illicit activities while at the same time the resulting artworks can command high prices at auction and have become collectable aesthetic commodities. Such paradoxical responses show that street art challenges conventional understandings of culture, law, crime and art. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination engages with those paradoxes in order to understand how street art reveals new modes of citizenship in the contemporary city. It examines the histories of street art and the motivations of street artists, and the experiences both of making street art and looking at street art in public space. It considers the ways in which street art has become an integral part of the identity of cities such as London, New York, Berlin, and Melbourne, at the same time as street art has become increasingly criminalised. It investigates the implications of street art for conceptions of property and authority, and suggests that street art and the urban imagination can point us towards a different kind of city: the public city. Street Art, Public City will be of interest to readers concerned with art, culture, law, cities and urban space, and also to readers in the fields of legal studies, cultural criminology, urban geography, cultural studies and art more generally.”
Alison Young is a professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She has been studying street art for a number of years, and acted as a policy consultant for Melbourne City Council.
Hope to see you at Misty Bar on Wednesday!
Who: Alison Young
What: Street Art, Public City
Where: Misty Bar, Hosier Lane, Melbourne.
Facebook event page here.
Leave a Comment
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked with *