Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Graffiti Goes Legit in L.A.?

Graffiti’s been around since, say, 1970 plus or minus, and has been dancing with the legit art world since, say, 1980 – or the legit art world has been dancing with it, whatever. Now the dancin’s serious. Last year Jerry Deitch was named director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and now he’s opened what the Venerable Grey Lady calls “the first major American museum exhibition devoted to street art, and a first for an occasionally controversial museum director making a debut.” So now it’s serious.

The exhibit
. . . tracks the great graffiti dispersion from styles first created in New York by Lee Quinones, Dondi, Futura 2000 and others and that soon enough made it to Philadelphia, Chicago, the West Coast and the world.

The Los Angeles Times termed “Art in the Streets” a “bombastic, near-overwhelming cavalcade of eye-candy,” a crowd-teasing pull-quote if ever there was one. And while it’s too early to know how the exhibition will fare with critics, there is little reason to doubt Mr. Broad’s assertion that it will likely pull the crowds in and engage a new public, most particularly “audiences that would not otherwise go to museums.”
Is this like Lincoln Center finally making a home for jazz in the 1990s?

Meanwhile, out in LA’s streets the writers are having at it:
An exhibition of street art that opened last week has been responsible, the authorities say, for a new wave of graffiti on buildings, lampposts and mailboxes in downtown Los Angeles, forcing a fresh crackdown on an activity that the police thought they had brought under control. And it has put them in the awkward position of trying to arrest people for doing something that is being celebrated by the city’s cultural establishment.
So, where’s the REAL street art? In the museum or on the streets? What’s the dif?

For what it’s worth, I think this Deitch character is, well, a character. But I don’t know much about him.

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