Graffiti and Street Art

Graffiti and street art have captured a global following in recent years, and the result is a proliferation of tags, paintings, stickers and stencils in slick metropolitan cities as well as unexpected locales in impoverished areas. Part of their appeal is that the forms allow viewers an understanding of the subtext of a city without resorting to mainstream accounts, or official histories. They offer an alternative history; a mapping of social trails or subcultural behaviours - a voyeuristic pleasure at entering the story of the city. In essence, the proliferation of pieces democratises the relationship between art and its audiences as it generates an open gallery, allowing the free enjoyment of skill of practitioners. As such, they provide a counter-narrative to the hyper-capitalist urban aesthetic. This ground-breaking book is the first systematic collection of critical scholarly works that explore issues related to contemporary urban public writing. 0It offers context-sensitive case studies from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Russia and Brazil, among others, grounded in different social, cultural and urban settings in order to highlight how this global phenomenon is localised and how local practices contribute to the perpetuation of the global scene.