Aesthetics for Birds

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art for Everyone

Live Blogging the Street Art Conference: Day Three

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 Philosophy’s Street Cred:
Limits & Interest Rates
The conference goes multi-borough today moving from Brooklyn’s Pratt to Manhattan’s NYU. Accusations of selling-out no doubt to follow. 

“Signature Counterexamples to Institutional Theories of Art”
Christopher Nagel (Minnesota)

Chris will be discussing how certain works of graffiti, specifically those of the heavily stylized signatory sort (tags, throw-ups), constitute counterexamples to Institutional Theory of Art.

Chris discusses the primary/secondary presentation distinction and claims graffiti writing’s primary presentation is to graffiti subcultures and so not to an artworld public. 



“Saving the Writing on the Wall: Two Models for Street Art and its Preservation”

Alison Lanier, Angela Sun, & Erich Hatala Matthes (Wellesley College)

Alison, Angela, & Erich explore the various preservation models one might want to adopt for street art. 


Adopting the performance model would claim that the preservation of street is motivated by preservation of embodiments/evidence of the performance, which has long since gone out of existence. E.g., the preservation of Five Pointz concerns the preservation not of street art but of a site at which street art performances frequently occur. 


Alternatively, one might choose the ruin model–i.e., a preservation model driven by the standard sorts of considerations driving the preservation of historically or culturally significant ruins.




“Two Incongruities of Yarn-Bombing”
Mary Beth Willard (Weber State)

Mary Beth tackles the kind of street art known as yarn-bombing or (urban knitting, graffiti knitting), which involves relocating the materials and products and practices of knitting traditionally located in the domestic private space to the public space of the street.


The first incongruity Mary Beth discusses is that radically unlike most graffiti and street art, yarn-bombing not only involves (if not unabashedly so) is the comparatively less destructive and so far less legally risky practices but also tropes traditionally recognized as feminine (domestic, soft, cozy, safe, pretty, etc.). 




“Domesticating the Streets: Feminist Street Art”
Sondra Bacharach (Victoria)

Sondra provides a in-depth analysis of feminist street art, specifically the various contents and ways in which those might be communicated and how those might relate to the broader notion of the street. 

Frosting Sugar Bomb


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