Street art is an art form that is displayed in public in surrounding buildings, on streets, trains, and other publicly visible surfaces. Many examples are presented in the form of guerrilla art, the purpose of which is to make a personal statement about the society in which the artist lives. Unfortunately, most of the restrictions surrounding street art are content neutral and subject to intermediate scrutiny, since they restrict time, place and form of expression; in Members of the City Council v. Daniel Feral, a riff of Alfred Barr's similar diagram of the lineages of modernism for the Museum of Modern Art draws a map of the overlapping historical movements that became consolidated in the interrelated practices of street art, creating a complex network of pop art influences and from action painting to semiotics and the cut-out creations of beat poetry.
However, we can now see a shift from streets to galleries; sometimes uncommissioned pieces are found at auctions or in museums, and an increasing number of street artists organize their own exhibitions. The artists tried to invoke the right to integrity, but the court refused to create a precedent in which unauthorized street art could block the destruction of the property on which it is placed. A work of street art cannot be classified as lost, because the artist created it voluntarily on someone else's property and left it there with full awareness of his actions. From this point of view, “street” street art connotes not only a lineage of image creation, but also an anti-authoritarian and anti-commercial spirit that apparently encourages an artist like Banksy, who has opposed the removal, exhibition and sale of his public murals.
For example, street art may already be within the scope of freedom of expression and institutionalizing the movement may not be wise. On the contrary, in the face of this rise of a new form of artistic expression, modern legal systems view street art as an act of vandalism. The only safe rule in discerning street art seems to be that its limits are mutable and are always built and reconstructed in accordance with these frictions. In all circumstances, it is essential to protect freedom of artistic expression and, in particular, to give owners the option of preserving the work of street art.
Sharon Matt Atkins, assistant art director at the Brooklyn Museum, shares the narrow conceptual definition of the Brooklyn street art duo. Graffiti is often confused with street art, but the “label”, the artist's signature, must be distinguished from “graffiti”, a term originally used by authorities to summarize the vandalism of writing on a wall. However, there is another argument that maintains that street art should not be confined within the rigid limits of the law either. Nowadays, the visual aesthetics of street art are of interest not only to gallery owners and auction houses, but also to photographers, advertisers, publishers and tourists.
Despite possible sanctions, street art is stronger than ever; it alters preconceived aesthetic norms and wreaks havoc on the direct application of the law.
