Wednesday, August 18, 2010
public art Vomet pukes on Living Walls mural
Posted by Jessica Blankenship @blanketboat on Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 12:56 PM
And so it begins.
This morning, passersby on the Inman Park stretch of Dekalb Avenue found their new roadside eye candy already disrupted; last night, Atlanta graf writer Vomet threw up all over a days-old mural by New York artist and Living Walls participant Gaia. The wall also includes pieces by Swampy and Greg Mike, neither of which was damaged.
Naturally, people are losing their shit about it today.
What do you think? Should the obvious amount of time, love, and generosity (many participants came a long way to give our city new art—for free) of Living Walls make other graf kids and artists keep a respectable distance—or do the size, build-up and hype make these walls unavoidable targets for getting fucked with? Is the heavy involvement of non-local artists doomed to draw competitive, territorial outbursts from some of Atlanta's Living Walls disaffiliates? The fleet of artist imports covered a hell of a lot of wall space in the past 10 days—there are damn sure going to be some Atlanta folks who want to take some of it back.
Regardless, there are some time-honored street art codes of conduct being broken here—labor-intensive murals being covered up by hasty tags, without even waiting a respectable amount of time, for example—that stand true regardless of the motivation.
As the Living Walls artists pack up and head out, leaving dozens of painted and pasted walls in their wake, the main question for the local street art population is this: is your artistic engagement of Atlanta's public spaces more about improving the aesthetics of our urban environment (in which case, most would argue that the Living Walls artists made a great contribution)...or is it about claiming territory?
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