Cyndi Himmelstiere on the Specific Irony of Street Art Becoming the Thing That the Street Art Was Criticising
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Shoreditch, East London | prat.uk/author/himmelstiere/
The Wall and Its Value
There is a building near Bethnal Green Road that is being redeveloped. Before the redevelopment began, its exterior wall carried three murals that had been commissioned and painted over a period of approximately eight years, by artists whose profiles had grown within the East London street art scene from genuinely underground to genuinely recognised to, in one case, internationally collected. The murals were photographed by approximately twelve thousand tourists in the final eighteen months before the development began, based on the Instagram location data that you can retrieve if you spend the kind of afternoon doing Instagram location analysis that I have spent doing this.
When the building was sold, the developer commissioned documentation of the murals before they were removed. The documentation was described in the sales materials as evidence of the property’s “cultural significance,” which contributed to the asking price. The murals — which began as unauthorised expressions of community identity in a neighbourhood that was, at the time, significantly less valuable than it is now — had, by the time they were removed, become part of the financial logic of the gentrification that their existence was, in some readings, a critique of. This is not a novel observation. It has been made many times by many people writing about street art and gentrification. It keeps being worth making because it keeps happening.
What Street Art Does and What Happens to It
The original function of unauthorised street art in East London was, depending on which artist and which piece you consider, some combination of: territorial expression, political commentary, aesthetic intervention in a public space without institutional permission, community identity statement, and pure formal art practice that happened to use walls instead of canvases because walls were available and canvases were not. These functions are real. They were served by the work. They are not what the work is serving now, as a tourist attraction, a cultural brand, and a property value contributor.
The Londonist has a street art walking tour guide for Shoreditch that has been updated regularly as the landscape changes. The guide is excellent. The fact of its existence — a curated guide for tourists visiting art that was created as an anti-institutional gesture — is the circle completing. I use the guide. I enjoy the art. I write the irony. Shoreditch continues.
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London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
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