http://www.flickr.com/photos/28750691@N03/3962865981/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28750691@N03/3962766233/
http://www.aakashnihalani.com/tape&mirrors.html

I’m not sure I understood all of your points, but here’s a few thoughts.

I write with a specific notion of “street art” according to which an artwork is street art if (and only if) it gets its significance (as least in part) from the way it uses the street. (So, if you want to say that an artwork is street art, you have to say how its use of the street is part of its meaning.) A lot of things are street art according to this definition, including some of the work of Alÿs. Whether someone is a “street artist” just means that most of the art they make is street art.

If an artist is respected for their street art, then they are probably skilled at using the street (in some way) to make art. So when such an artist decides to do a gallery show, there is a real question as to whether their work will be good, for the very thing they use to make the art we respect them for making – the street – is not available for use. The salience (or non-emptiness) of this question is enhanced when the work these artists put in the gallery looks a lot like what they put on the street. It would be critically blind to merely “see the work for what it is, what it does, and exactly where it is, with out any shorthand.”

That said, I should clarify that neither of us (myself or Elizabeth (if I may speak for you!)) are concerned with whether the “transition to the gallery” is a move up in the social world. We both consider these spaces to be very different contexts in which to display art and are interested in the differences between them. I’d also be interested if Jeff Koons started wheatpasting.

One more point of clarification. Given the way I think about street art, I don’t think it is possible for street art to move indoors (on this point Elizabeth and I might disagree, depending on how she thinks of “street art’s shift indoors”). The “transition” I’m interested in is not whether you can take a piece of street art and put it in a gallery (by taking it from the street it’s (usually) no longer street art). I’m interested in whether someone who is good at street art can make good non-street art.

Nick

Part of our mission is also to educate non-street art people and street art people about each other…for far too long have they both ignored each other and interacted in a rather superficial way. I think we’d like to reply to your questions with an upcoming post (or two or three) and I’ll definitely talk to Nick & Elizabeth about this.

I do want to say that none of us have an agenda beyond loving street art and I hope that comes through in our writing. I will also say, and you point out in some ways, that I think that street art is ahead of the curve in terms of developing new & innovative economic models to sustain themselves (online sales, etc.) and this will most definitely be part of the conversation we have hear.

Welcome to Hyperallergic and I’m so glad we have intelligent readers like you!

Liz…. You are so right that the context shift means everything….

On the street, this works function like a visual gift – they hit you out of nowhere as you turn the corner and you can pause and appreciate them for FREE.

It’s like getting a free drink at an open bar, your expectations are so low and you just want to squeeze as much fun out of as you can. And I love how at open bars, people just drink what they are offered – even it means drinking something they wouldn’t normally pay for.

The joy of the random encounter, the generosity of seeing art for free is gone in the gallery context. Once you start paying for art (or your drinks), the party just doesn’t have that relaxed anything goes vibe.

It’s a friday, so I can’t help but compare this to drinks

I think work that is touted for being “on the street” is suspect in the first place. Generally, fans and critics talking about “the street” have narrow ideas what it might mean, if they use it in this sense. The best work hasn’t leaned its “street” credibility in years because there is so much else to stay busy with. From just chasing good looking aesthetics, to new systems of making it, collaborative pairings, in video, in photos, on the web, in documentation, looking at history and theory. “Street” artist today work on boats, in rivers, in the woods, in tunnels, in their bedrooms, on walls that are legal, walls that are illegal, hoarding that’s not very illegal at all, legal walls where someone could still get upset, on illegal ads which is illegal, but eradicating something illegal, in public restrooms and inside the public’s private homes. The people doing work at the frontier, not just settling it with endless repetition, are going to test definitions like “street”. These are also the only artists relevant. They don’t count on the genre to make their work, but for their work to make the genre.

If we take the above to be true its an empty question whether street makes the jump to gallery. We can try instead to see the work for what it is, what it does, and exactly where it is, with out any shorthand.

Just as there is no one street condition in which to work, there’s more than one gallery condition. Gallery can mean the artist had ample budget and support and guaranteed sales and assistants (like a Deitch show), or it can mean only they were permitted to set-up a very limited installation, under cheap lighting, and had to pay for everything themselves – shipping of work, promo, making it, supplies. Or it could be space the artist controls, or a squat which they do not control. A Deitch show is going to be very impressive but ruin the work in a different way than a terrible gallery. An artist run space (like a Faile show) isn’t even a gallery except that its exactly like it, and a squat or alternative space could really be anything: organized or not, legal or not, while still a gallery show experience in every sense.

If the above is true, there is less meaningful difference between street and gallery, because there’s dozens of differences all directions within each. If for example; Francis Alÿs (who works on the street) did a show in Brooklynite (a gallery), he’d be slumming it. The dangerous assumption most readers will take for granted is that the establishment is better. That outsiders wish to graduate to insiders. But with plenty of successful models of online street-art sales to point to; Pictures on Walls, Studio Chromie, Paper Monster, and dozens more, and plenty of street artists selling work directly through their own web sites; the assumption could just as well be flipped. Galleries, not artists, seem to be suspect; if activity is ever expanding away from them, and success happens most frequently elsewhere.

Thankyou.