It’s not a bad thing as it sustains artists, and they sometimes get to say something to the audience as well. “Dubai has a strong consumer culture and it’s no surprise that brands will use street art to reach a certain demographic. For Gary Yong, a Dubai-based, Malaysian-born artist, the city’s willingness to push street art makes sense. You would be hard pushed to find an artist who didn’t welcome the city’s embrace of the art form. But, like the rest of us, they need to eat too, and brands – in Dubai at least – provide a platform for artists to create and get paid. When you look at how society rewards so many of the wrong people, it’s hard not to view financial reimbursement as a badge of self-serving mediocrity.” It’s easy, of course, to treat artists as somehow on a higher plane than the rest of us. We’re not supposed to be embraced in that way. Listen to the world’s most famous street artist, Banksy, who in an interview with Village Voice, said: “Commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist. Much of this, of course, is anathema to the purists, who still view the art form as something that should be a rage against the machine, rather than enabled by it. The fence garnered huge media reaction, became a tourist attraction and showed the bank in a different light. Despite the inflammatory nature of the work, the ECB reacted positively, even buying one of the panels to hang inside its headquarters. Soon, the art began to criticise the ECB: outlandish caricatures of the ECB’s president and Angela Merkel appeared alongside critiques of the Eurozone and capitalism. In 2012, the European Central Bank gave €10,000 to a group of local artists to paint a fence that surrounded the renovation work on its new Frankfurt headquarters. It’s not just in Dubai that this is happening, and it can make for strange bedfellows. For the artists, they get a blank canvas (how blank depends on the tightness of the brief) and, crucially, they get paid. Aside from the odd tag here and there, street art in Dubai is very much a sanctioned activity – from the tourist board, perhaps, or brands hoping to to co-opt their coolness. The common thread running through these pieces? They were all commissioned. He described his lenticular mural, which used the angular blocks of a building to create three separate perspectives, as one of the most challenging pieces he has ever created. One of the most interesting pieces is from American Beau Stanton. The breadth of the work showed the possibilities this art form offers – from Blek Le Rat’s whimsical stencils to D*Face’s large-scale pop art. Its developer Meraas brought in 15 international street artists to produce work as part of another initiative, Dubai Walls. Take the Dubai Street Museum, where sixteen large murals cropped up around 2nd December Street, created by a host of global artists including German maestro Case Maclaim, and the Russian Julia Volchkova.Ĭity Walk, a hip outdoor complex in Al Wasl, has also embraced the art form. But it has been Dubai’s takeup of the practice that has perhaps been the most unusual.įrom the relatively new City Walk to the long established streets of Karama, it’s hard to travel anywhere in Dubai in 2018 without coming across pieces of large scale outdoor art. The art has spread out from New York’s five boroughs to become a global movement, embraced everywhere from São Paulo to Shanghai. They would be shocked at the global acceptance it has now won. Many New Yorkers at the time saw the burgeoning movement as nothing more than vandalism. Some of the early taggers in that chaotic period turned into world famous artists, like Keith Haring or Lee Quiñones, whose work now hangs in galleries rather than on street corners. Soon, those scratches became paint, and crude tags became works of art. Street art was born in New York City in the late 1960s, when kids would scratch their names into walls. It started, as most cultural movements do, with an act of defiance. 30 July 2018 Anathema to graffiti purists, street art has been embraced the world over, particularly in Dubai.
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