Paper short abstract:

This photo essay regarding Whitechapel's Street Art shows its significance as the expression of a lively and provocative urban culture, its actors, concerns, images and beliefs. Street Art is a central key of this area's urban space image.

Paper long abstract:

More and more often, art is on the street. It leaves the walls of museums and galleries, the inaccessible and closed showcases covered with glass, which nobody can touch and sometimes hardly see, and walks straight into the eyes of passersby, becoming a part of their daily life, as it fills in building facades, garden walls, construction fences. It is everywhere, spontaneous and illegal interventions that bring Monalisa to the streets and Banksy to Christie's high-bid auctions. It places images in our eyes, messages in our head, shocks us, pleases us, revolts us, makes us think, we love it, we hate it. But we are certainly not indifferent to it. It's ephemeral; today it's there, tomorrow it's gone. Today it makes sense, it's actual, mirrors our contemporary urban culture; tomorrow it is replaced by another image, such as TV images, newspaper news, our own concerns are replaced at dizzying speed, very hard to follow. We can't keep it, frame it, it's difficult to place it in a museum. At the same time, it's a mixture of various interventions and authors, overlapping each other, constant work in progress, such as life and society are. But it's so much more than that. Street Art is the art in public space, which works as its support, its canvas, dignifying and identifying it and, at the same time, dignified and identified by it. "This is not Whitechapel Gallery" but it might as well be.