Mick Hartley

Art critic Matthew Collings doesn’t like street art:

Do you like adolescent entertainment? Do you have the mentality of a teenager? Do you find Cézanne a bit overrated? If the answer is yes, yes and yes, then I don’t know what to do with you. You are a childish philistine literalist. Get down to Bonhams (one of the world’s oldest and largest auctioneers of fine art and antiques) next Tuesday for their first-ever dedicated sale of “street art” – this is the experience for you.

“Street art” means graffiti, comics-style stuff, spray-paint art, flyposting – the art of groovy youth. The stars of the street-art sale will include Banksy, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Antony Micallef, Adam Neate, Faile, Paul Insect, Space Invader, Swoon, D*Face and Shepard Fairey….

Gareth Williams, the urban-art specialist at Bonhams, says: “By transposing their images from street wall to canvas, urban artists are now creating a permanent legacy without compromising the vitality of their art.” Poor Williams – how giddy and weightless life must be for him, to be in the business of using words without having any interest in what they mean.

“Vitality” is what Matisse or Goya has, or Islamic mosaics, or Greek statues, or abstract paintings by Jackson Pollock – all that old obscure stuff. Vitality in art is a rare quality, it means life – you see it and you feel life is worth living. It goes with originality and surprise, a mixture of the fresh and the eternal. It’s found throughout the history of art. It’s the opposite of convention and routine. The point about street art is that it has to conform to street-art convention. It has to be a routine. It has to express the personality of a stoner, grinning, funny and kidlike.

This seems a little harsh on poor Gareth Williams. By usual art world standards what Williams says is surprisingly comprehensible – reasonable even. “By transposing their images from street wall to canvas, urban artists are now creating a permanent legacy without compromising the vitality of their art.” Yes it’s all a bit silly, but as an employee of an auction house about to run a sale of urban art, what would you expect him to say? You can read much more pretentious crap any day of the week in art magazines, at galleries….in critics’ reviews. The art world’s drowning in vacuous nonsense.

It’s the “vitality”, clearly, that gets to Collings, but I don’t see that it’s an inappropriate word in the context. Why redefine it so it’s only applicable to great works of art? Much street art does have vitality. It may be crap – much of it is crap – but you can’t deny it has vitality.

It’s the snottiness that gets me – “Do you have the mentality of a teenager?” and all that. Are we meant to be awestruck by Collings’ astonishing sophistication in being able to distinguish Matisse or Goya from the likes of Banksy? Not that I particularly disagree with the overall point of the article….

“Street art” is adolescent. With the exception of Basquiat, the artists whose work is on sale at Bonhams next week are talented people in that area, but the area itself is of absolutely no interest unless you’ve got an arrested mentality. Its rise as something to take seriously says something about the weird state of art now. The core of art today is satire and gags and attention-getting stunts. As a society we all kind of know this but somehow we also accept that it’s a social faux pas ever to mention it. Banksy being considered a “conceptual artist” is only a measure of how banal and feeble the “concepts” of contemporary art are, and an indication of art’s slide into all-out philistinism. To appear tuned-in we now have to pretend that a literal crack in the floor at Tate Modern means global unease (the latest commission by Tate Modern in its annual Unilever series), that a lot of real people standing on a marble plinth means “humanity” (Anthony Gormley’s proposal for a new work on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square) and that Marc Quinn’s new sculptures at White Cube of foetuses are “influenced by Michelangelo”.

It’s the art world that’s the problem, not “street art”. Banksy may not be high culture, but he doesn’t claim to be.

Anyway, here’s some London street art taken over the past few weeks. No, it’s not the Sistine chapel, but it livens the place up:

Hackney Wick:

Shoreditch:

Brick Lane:

The Greenway at Plaistow:

South Tottenham: