Modern graffiti has been around since the. Because they have been around longer, there are fewer of them, and they are generally used to establish a person's status and reputation as an expert artist within the graffiti community, rather than to establish the extent of their presence. This activist spirit highlights how street art, unlike chalk art or a child's graffiti, is centrally designed for others to see, for people to discover and not just a particular subgroup of people (those who go to museums, those who belong to a band of graffiti artists at war, those who live on a particular street), but also for the community in general. Graffiti and labeling are omnipresent and omnipresent, and almost everyone has something (usually negative) to say about them.
At the other end of the spectrum, graffiti writers also spend a lot of time and energy creating what they call “masterpieces”, highly ornate and decorative ways of writing their pseudonyms. Before exploring how consensuality and activism allow us to distinguish between public art, street art and graffiti in the next two sections, I would like to first consider Nicholas Riggle's alternative approach to understanding these three concepts. Today, he's one of the most in-demand graffiti artists in the country and has a waiting list of clients who want to pay him to paint on their walls, including the recently opened Downtown Marriott, NRG Stadium, Phoenicia Foods, the Houston Public Library and Market Square. The goal of most graffiti writers is to gain as much notoriety within the graffiti community as possible.
JR and Mademoiselle Maurice are typical street artists who create art with all kinds of different and unexpected artistic tools to promote their own socio-political agendas on the streets. Elia credits partnerships with the city of Houston, administrative districts and other organizations for the growth of the Houston wall art scene over the past decade. This article explores the nature of this emerging art form and explains some of the differences between street art, public art and “mere” graffiti. The festival is produced by UP Art Studio, a public art consultant and facilitator, who has played a fundamental role in the creation of hundreds of murals and art installations in Houston, including the Mini Murals project.
Street art, artistic graffiti, and promotable graffiti share this challenging and challenging attitude toward the legal status of art in public spaces to varying degrees, even if they differ in their legal status and aesthetic merits. Consensual works, on the other hand, do not have the right to such protection, so their creators must resign themselves to the possibility that their works are victims of changes and alterations that are beyond their control. The mere fact of creating street art is an implicit criticism and challenge both for the authorities and for the dominant status quo, for example, over Bansky's “authorized graffiti zones”.
