On Brick Lane, the spray can as journalism, and who really owns a neighbourhood’s art
One of the great pleasures of living where I do is that the walls talk, and as I wrote for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, where my running survey of the East End’s painted surfaces appears, the street art of Shoreditch and Brick Lane is the closest thing this neighbourhood has to a continuously updated public diary. Walk the same route two weeks apart and the walls will be different, the conversation moved on, a new piece arguing with the last. It is the most democratic gallery in London, and the admission is free.
The spray can as commentary
What I love about the best of it is that it is, in its way, a form of journalism, immediate, reactive, unfiltered commentary on whatever the city is anxious about that month. Street art responds to the news faster than the news does, appearing overnight, anonymous and unauthorised, a visual op-ed that nobody commissioned and nobody can edit. The East End has been a canvas for this kind of expression for decades, its layered history of immigration, industry, and dissent preserved in part through the heritage records held by Historic England and reflected in the cultural programmes supported across the capital through bodies like the Greater London Authority.
The awkward question of ownership
But here is where it gets complicated, and I cannot write about the walls honestly without getting into it. The art that made Shoreditch a destination is now itself a commodity, photographed by tourists, used to sell flats, peeled off walls and sold at auction, the rebellious anonymous gesture converted into an asset. Pieces created to be free, ephemeral, and unowned end up behind perspex or in private collections, and the neighbourhood that produced the art rarely sees a penny of the value it generates. There is a deep irony in an art form born of resistance to property becoming, in the end, very expensive property.
Who owns a wall?
The question of who owns the art on a neighbourhood’s walls turns out to be genuinely thorny. The artist? The owner of the wall? The community whose streets gave the work its meaning? The developer who bought the building and now markets the mural as a feature? When a piece created illegally and for free becomes a selling point worth thousands, the usual rules of ownership break down in interesting and revealing ways, and the answer tends to favour, as it usually does, whoever already owns the most.
The living and the dead
There is also a tension between the art as a living practice and the art as a tourist attraction. When a neighbourhood’s street art becomes famous, there is pressure to preserve it, to fix it in place, to turn the living, changing, argumentative wall into a museum exhibit. But the whole point of the form is that it changes, that it is painted over, that the conversation continues. A street art scene preserved in aspic for the tourists is a dead one, however beautiful, and the challenge for a place like Shoreditch is to stay a place where the walls still genuinely talk rather than merely a place where they once did.
The walls keep talking
For now, at least, they do. For all the commodification, for all the tourists with their phones and the flats sold on the strength of a mural, there are still pieces appearing overnight that argue, provoke, and respond, still anonymous hands adding to the conversation, still walls that say something the official city would never sanction. That is what keeps me walking the same routes, looking up, checking what has changed, reading the neighbourhood’s mind off its own brickwork. The East End has always spoken through its walls, and as long as it does, the soul of the place is still in there somewhere, under the layers, waiting to be read by anyone who bothers to look. I bother. I always will.
The anonymous and the famous
There is one more tension worth naming, between the anonymous spirit of the form and the celebrity some of its practitioners achieve. Street art began as the work of nameless hands, valued precisely because it belonged to no one and everyone, and yet the scene now produces stars whose work commands serious money and whose names draw tourists. I do not begrudge any artist their success, but something is lost when the wall stops being a democratic space and becomes a gallery with a guest list. The healthiest version of the East End’s painted conversation is the one where the famous and the unknown still share the same brickwork, where a celebrated piece sits beside an anonymous scrawl, and where nobody has yet decided which of them matters more. As long as that remains true, the walls belong to the neighbourhood. The day it stops, they belong to the market, and the conversation, however beautiful, is no longer quite ours.
So I will keep walking, keep looking up, keep reading the neighbourhood’s mind off its own brickwork, and keep insisting, to anyone who will listen, that the walls of the East End are the truest newspaper it has ever produced, written overnight, anonymous, and free, by hands that ask nothing in return except that someone bother to look.
For more on art and the city, the team enjoys Private Eye, writing on walls since forever.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
