ABSTRACT
From its inception in different American cities during the 1970s, uncommissioned street art has enjoyed wide circulation. Today it can be found in almost every city around the world (Gastman et al. 2007; Ruiz 2008; Lewisohn 2008). Although at first sight uncommissioned street art looks like an un planned artistic practice spontaneously created by men and women in randomly chosen places, in fact it amounts to a corpus of knowledge created by individuals and groups who are aware of the aesthetic and political purpose of their actions. This artistic practice has evolved over the course of the last forty years parallel to the institutionalized art world. Several street artists have gained fame and consequently their artworks have been exhibited in galleries and museums. Sometimes these worlds overlap but uncommissioned street art is still made under totally different social conditions than commissioned street art; it is done clandestinely, mostly during nighttime. The present chapter draws attention to the ways this unique artistic knowledge is produced and distributed. Put in other words, I will examine how potential artists become street artists and how the artistic competences, which include an element of tacit knowledge, are transferred from experienced artists to budding ones.
