The Subversion Lost: When Street Art Becomes a Megaphone
What happens when an art form born on the streets from the most marginalized fringes of urban youth—with its disjointed language, spontaneous codes, and undisciplined rage—loses all its subversive power and becomes the megaphone of the state, a multinational corporation, or a brand? This is the sad trajectory of street art: a tool used by municipal governments to “enhance” degraded neighborhoods instead of undertaking serious restoration work, or an advertising device exploited by major companies for promotional purposes.
From Vincenzo Profeta’s book, BR Ammazzate Banksy
Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, street art version in Arezzo. Wikimedia Commons, license CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo Luistxo.
Hatred is the most ignored force in our society. It is seen as lowly, a stigma of the unhappy; something society snubs, considers petty. Someone who expresses hatred online is a troll, a disturbed person with relational issues. And yet, hatred is one of the most world-changing forces. But the system hates hatred—it stigmatizes it. Everything must be shared, soft; art must deliver positive messages. Graffiti must be colorful and technically precise. It must be grandiose, oversized, cute; the rebel is, deep down, good. And the writing becomes an attempt to influence public opinion, having nothing to do with art in the strict sense, with experimenting with new languages and visions.
At this point, I wonder whether it will ever be possible to create hateful or satirical graffiti, and whether public taste is truly starting to adjust to all the nonsense circulating in the art world in recent years, nonsense that has moved from walls to galleries. Paraphrasing the well-known Italian rapper Salmo, graffiti has ended up like being invited to sell smoke while being friends with the cops. Hatred has vanished, replaced by tolerance and backpack humor. Graffiti and power now form a perverse relationship of love and hate. Yet, the fact that a particularly figurative technique or fashionable lettering is considered beautiful highlights the major limitation of those who can no longer express the true essence of rebellious art: hatred!
One must be offline. Hack, disobey, violate, insult, pirate. Create ambushes. Art is freedom, chance, chaos. Erase erasure, cancel cancel culture, the gate to the abyss. Let’s reformat the formatters, worlds, signs, instances, languages; burn their ads and etiquette. God is an anagram of “hate”—captivity, the soul, suffering becomes hate, once a violent sign; escape through the folds of time and threads of space, to be perceived and understood—that is the horror of our age. The essence of street art is this forced understanding, this illogical logic.
Hatred is considered such a problem by society that last spring Parliament created a committee on hate. Only sanctioned, manipulated hatred is allowed, while the hunger, desire for redemption, and frustration it represents remain a genuine threat to the bourgeois, robotic lifestyle the system wants to promote. It was precisely the writings on walls—sometimes crazy, nonsensical—that captured these liberatory, subconscious impulses. Yet today, this practice is put on display in city centers like a talent show of rhetorical imagery, chasing social media visibility or the approval of a gallery owner or corporate manager.
Imperfection, lack of intent, randomness, and freshness are now banned from this style of painting. What remains is sterile communication of a few stereotyped concepts for an audience largely indifferent, promoting almost total participation in this nauseating attempt at social engineering. This is what street art, graffiti, and ultra-environmentalist youth culture à la Greta Thunberg have become. A generation of hoodie-wearing vandals, like Australia’s Wandjina—the alien Aboriginal spirits who taught men the new law, themselves depicted in graffiti—now, in mystical cases, flaunt a New Age philosophy applied to cartoonish aesthetics.
Abandoned remains of Siemensbahn railway line at former Siemensstadt station. Berlin, Germany. Wikimedia Commons. Photo A.Savin.
Is this the new real estate speculation of the millennium? Or another stunt for headlines? How can anyone take this seriously without descending into gonzo journalism over this emptiness, these absurdities, these barroom discussions? Graffiti—the global and quintessentially cosmopolitan art form—becomes integration as the dilution and embalming of human hopes. For over twenty-five years, the same 1980s rhetoric persists, creating a flat, global language to say nothing—and say it poorly.
Social acceptance transforms graffiti into murals, stripping it of its art status and reducing it to an aesthetic derivative. I picture Diego Rivera, with his socialist belly, commissioned by a Mexican municipality, splattering works on a wall. Truly ugly graffiti don’t exist; there are only inappropriate, ugly, and socially acceptable ones, fully integrated into the taste of the average passerby—a complete bourgeoisification of how art is understood. Sign and intent are no longer enough; it’s about context. And we are all the judges of a movement that should be free from inception, without constraints or labels, but instead conforms to the tastes of the mayor or the pious associations. Perhaps it is time to set limits now that graffiti artists have morphed from muralists to moralists. Street art was once about grassroots social claims, uncompromising with power. That dream no longer sells; today it sells itself—to jerks with big wallets. It has become advertising, regressive or progressive—the very thing street art once opposed.
What I admire most in the graffiti world is bad graffiti—the ones that… well… fail. Their creators paint in obscure, shameful spots; these works are exercises, yet poetic, full of adolescent creative tension. Often by first-time spray-can users, excluded by curators, anonymous masterpieces, ugly, crooked, imperfect—but finally rebellious, signs of naïve sensitivity enchanted by the colorful world, made by people who can’t draw, can’t control spray paint, without masks or projectors, just winging it. Bad graffiti is the true nonconformist of today’s street art system: misspelled, deformed lettering; “they tried,” I always say. Pathetic and poetic simultaneously, at least genuine—the mere attempt at coolness is missing in the precise, bourgeois, state-sanctioned graffiti.
These crude wall marks are often the real pulse of the country. For me, the numbers of perverts in a highway rest stop bathroom are more meaningful than any Basquiat piece—that’s true tension: a society telling you to fuck off and inviting you to fuck it. If I were ever to make graffiti, that’s what I would do. Politicians, cultural associations, competitions, walls around parishes, old comic characters: Tintin, Snowy, Lucky Luke, Asterix, the Smurfs, and more—go fuck yourselves, social nightmares. This little book is a pretext to insult you, as you can’t insult someone making a fake tear in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and calling himself JR. You can’t help but itch to touch it—calligraphy and pretentious style, baroque and idiotic, impersonal touches on walls of suffering, broken hands, exploited subproletariat.
Graffiti, born as new art and soon degenerating into street art, are children of the greatest cultural genocide in history: globalization and forced universalism. Art is a vandalism against vandalism, a piracy of grace, a philosopher’s stone, a misdeed, a heist, a love rape, a crazy, chaotic act—a project without a plan. That is how beauty is exalted, eternal truth, which is never communication. Communication is the lowest degradation of art; street art is communication, endemic corruption, decay by the post-human primate, the final act of decline. Street art now functions like administrative bureaucracy, aligned with mass media, the enforcer of politically correct power, hitting everyone, the opposite of truth as beauty.
An artistic mural born from the Talking Walls project, promoted by the
cultural affairs department, which brings together nationally and
internationally renowned artists such as Millo. Wikimedia Commons, license CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo Mrobot2.0
Art is never social or consolatory. That is why graffiti, street art, and murals are no longer art. They occupy space illegally; art is an elegant dive into the folds of nothingness, invoking or cursing God—never meant to decorate teen backpacks before the tomb of art history. Communication masquerading as art destroys every dream of freedom, the truth of love, struggle, or a wild idea. Nothing in art should be reassuring, as nothing in life is certain. Those who make street art become addicts of progress, zombies of postmodernity and enforced education, promoting the self of another, borrowing society’s worst ideas. Since it became fashionable, and graffiti artists became paid, compliant “street artists,” nothing interesting emerges anymore. They reveal themselves on social media, municipal graffiti maps—potential anarchists turned municipal cops in a short step.
Credits: Vincenzo Profeta – Il Nemico
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