ABSTRACT
Street art has been exhibited in major museums, works on canvas by street artists have sold for six figure sums in auction houses, artworks have been drilled out of walls by avid collectors, and street art and graffiti have been debated at art festivals around the world. This chapter engages with some of the ways visual criminology can think through the conflicting cultural and legal responses to street art and graffiti as forms of urban aesthetics. The antagonism between street art and graffiti is widely acknowledged by writers and artists, but not all of them wish it to continue. Although the terms 'graffiti' and 'street art' are often swapped around when talking of illicit mark-making, it would be incorrect to assume that the two cultural forms are equal when it comes to the attribution of cultural value, whose unequal allocation between the two forms of mark-making has seen street art shift to the top of a starkly uneven hierarchy.
