Description
An upsetting question ?
Labels are a little like Captain Haddock’s famous band-aid, they stick to our skin and we can’t get rid of them. This is true of the term Street Art. It has never been so popular yet so controversial, and the object of sometimes heated conversations between those who demand total freedom and rebel against the “recuperation“ and the ones who want to be artists above all, the walls simply being a field of expression among others. By testifying this way, in most of the talents we met when making this publication – Nowart, Etnik, Shaka… – passion prevails. None of them wanted to choose !
In fact, what really matters is that this phenomenon, born outside of convention preserves its creative strength and its capacity to open up to a larger public. For them, it is often the first contact with art and culture. And if some people discover the desire to take a peek inside of a gallery, we can only congratulate ourselves. Equally, we are delighted that institutions and the art market are largely opening up to what is becoming a major contemporary art movement. Urban Art must continue to exist in the street and finally enter the museums. This, of course, doesn’t mean transposing pieces made for the streets into museums, but rather recognizing the right of artists to create in-studio pieces which emulate the work in the streets…
Gabrielle Gauthier et Christian Charreyre
Editors in Chief
