ABSTRACT

In the context of the focus in this section of the book on the writing (but also representations and reading) of graffiti and street art, it may be interesting to notice how, in the mid 2010s, a slight yet perceptible tendency to disaffiliate from the label of ‘street art’ has appeared. This positioning manoeuvre has been made more or less subtly and more or less contingently by some artists, and especially by various curators and gallerists. Certainly, several artists belonging to the big wave of street art of the early 2000s have sound idealistic, if not ideological reasons to be disappointed today. To them, as well as to several cultural critics, street art has, in the meantime, turned into the veritable mark of urban gentrification, the proof that capitalist dynamics have entirely recuperated the spontaneous creativity from below that characterized the early 2000s explosion of global street art.2