THE situation seems desperate. Museums are in hunker-down mode, gearing up for their fall extravaganzas. Galleries are either locked up as tight as banks at midnight or force-marching through the final, forlorn days of group shows. As late August slouches toward September in New York, it always seems as if a city usually overflowing with art had suddenly run short of it: the pre-Labor-Day drought. But where there is a MetroCard or a Citi Bike or even just a comfortable pair of shoes, there is always hope. The only trick is to think inside-out. Over the last decade, the city, like many dense metropolises around the world, has become a paradise of art on the streets, a legacy — sometimes directly, sometimes in spirit only — of the graffiti movement that took root in New York in the 1970s and ‘80s more powerfully than anywhere else, spawning a new American art form. That legacy has, of course, always been deeply contested, even as graffiti has sunk deeply into the DNA of 21st-century visual culture. At its heart, it is still an outlaw form, deriving much of its power from its surreptitious creation, under cover of darkness, in places where some people have no interest in seeing it and might need to spend thousands of dollars to remove it. (“It’s everywhere,” one official in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a new graffiti mecca, recently told The New York Times. “It’s epidemic.”) But alongside unauthorized and highly ephemeral street art — a world that now includes not only paint and wheat-paste paper pieces but also materials from knitted yarn to tile to Lego parts to hacked digitized road signs — the city now boasts more or less officially enshrined works scattered throughout the boroughs. There are commissioned murals, memorial murals, city-supported painting projects, ambitious pieces that serve as signs for stores and restaurants, and hundreds of so-called permission walls, in which more free-form work goes up with few objections. What follows is a highly subjective guided tour of the best of this art — some of it old, some of it almost drippingly brand-new. It is generally visible and accessible seven days a week, with no admission charge.
Posted on: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 18:29:57 +0000
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