Co-Option of Graffiti and the Persona of the Artist in the Neoliberal Age

Abstract

This history of modern graffiti from 1970, specifically in the United States and Britain, is a story of the co-option of graffiti into the sanitized, deradicalized form of street art. From its oppositional politics in the 1940s–60s period, graffiti undergoes significant transformations in the forty years after 1970. This transformation is catalyzed by neoliberalism, which leads to significant changes in the structuring of the city, the culture industry, and the functioning of the artist within them. Within popular culture, this process is defined as a dialectic of containment/resistance. Within this dialectic, graffiti is first transformed into a product for upper-class consumption. In later stages, this form of graffiti is further transformed into a middle-class art form—street art. Graffiti is reconfigured and reified through various strategies of the neoliberal city to be imbued with ritual functions and thus aura. In this way, street art commodifies the art and aura of graffiti, as well as the persona of the artist, in a process of co-option that employs various strategies in each decade.