This art icle was downloaded by: [ USC Universit y of Sout hern California] On: 07 March 2015, At : 22: 39 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Cultural Studies Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ rcus20 CONVERGENCE ON THE STREET Sarah Banet -Weiser Published online: 15 Sep 2011. To cite this article: Sarah Banet -Weiser (2011) CONVERGENCE ON THE STREET, Cult ural St udies, 25: 4-5, 641-658, DOI: 10. 1080/ 09502386. 2011. 600553 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 09502386. 2011. 600553 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem ands, cost s, expenses, dam ages, and ot her liabilit ies what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h, in relat ion t o or arising out of t he use of t he Cont ent . This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sublicensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 forbidden. Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions Sarah Banet-Weiser CONVERGENCE ON THE STREET Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 Rethinking the authentic/commercial binary This article examines shifting definitions of creativity in urban spaces in the contemporary USA, and analyzes how different definitions of creativity inform an understanding of convergence in the context of contemporary street art. This essay examines the logic that mobilizes these dynamics, and, through the cultural lens of contemporary street art, asks how and in what ways does ‘creativity’ matter differently
indeed, have a different value
in the contemporary moment of convergence and global capitalism? I situate convergence culture as part of a broad process mobilized by political, economic, cultural and historical transitions that centrally involve the marketization and branding of arts and culture. Through the examination of street art by artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey, I focus on the convergence of creative ‘authenticity’ and the commercial. Keywords street art; graffiti; creativity/creative city; authenticity; brand culture; self-branding Introduction In 1997, in the UK, the focus of the Arts Policy documents of the British Labour Party changed from the ‘cultural industries’ as a descriptive of the activities involved in arts and cultural policies to the newly named ‘creative industries’ (McRobbie 2004, Garnham 2005). During this same period (and continuing to the contemporary moment) the US witnessed a more privatized, corporate-led movement in the arts and culture, one that has preoccupied government officials and city planners with developing particular kinds of convergences with ‘public
private partnerships’ and ‘creative cities’ that hope to increase city revenue by enticing talented, ‘creative’ professionals to relocate and set up shop in the media, arts and cultural industries as well as to stimulate tourist trade (Caves 2000, Florida 2002, Peck 2005, Currid 2008, Greenberg 2008). These shifts are indicative of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century Western worlds of marketing, urban planning, city policy and nation building, where there has been a renewed emphasis on the creative Cultural Studies Vol. 45, Nos. 4
5 July
September 2011, pp. 641
658 ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2011.600553 Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 642 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S industries as an economic and cultural force that can do the work of revitalizing and transforming place and space through arts and culture. During this same general time period, while the creative industries were being economically restructured in Western contexts, creative production itself was undergoing major transformations. The rapid rise of new media and digital technologies led to new cultural innovations in terms of social media and participatory or convergence culture, and more and more individuals were authorized to ‘be creative’ within these contexts. ‘Old’ media such as television was restructured due to widespread deregulation, global distribution and the emergence of the cable industry, which similarly led to a more individuated sense of the audience as smaller and smaller niche markets. And, in the world of contemporary art, street art became a widely recognizable and lucrative art form; murals on urban walls, posters in all spaces imaginable, stickers and stencils with artists’ signatures and logos became a common sight in global cities. During this time, street artists such as Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and Blu developed their own artistic ‘brand’ both on the streets and in major art galleries around the world.1 As Nicholas Garnham points out in his work on the transition in the UK from the ‘cultural industries’ to the ‘creative industries’, this shift is not a mere ‘neutral change of labels’, but rather involves both political and theoretical stakes (Garnham 2005). In this essay, I extend Garnham’s analysis to interrogate not only the stakes involved in shifting definitions of creativity in urban spaces in the USA but also how these dynamics inform an understanding of convergence in the context of contemporary street art.2 I approach convergence culture from a specific vantage point: the concept of convergence as I use it in this essay does not indicate a mapping of two or more previously distinct cultural artifacts or media platforms. Rather, I situate convergence culture as part of a broad process mobilized by political, economic, cultural and historical transitions that centrally involve what Angela McRobbie calls the ‘entrepreneurialisation of arts and culture’ (McRobbie 2004). The convergence of creative ‘authenticity’ and the commercial is my focus. This essay examines the logic that mobilizes these transitions, and, through the cultural lens of contemporary street art, asks how and in what ways does ‘creativity’ matter differently
indeed, have a different value
in the contemporary moment of convergence and global capitalism? While certainly there has never been a generalized consensus in the public or in scholarship about what ‘creativity’ is and means, there are a number of different kinds of contradictions surrounding creativity and the creative industries in the early twenty-first century US culture that lead us to a different way of marking distinctions not only between cultural productions themselves but also between kinds of creative authorship. ‘Creativity’ covers an expansive, generalized terrain, especially in an online era, where there is much focus on convergence culture, apparently enabled by consumer creativity, the flexible architecture of the Internet, and the relative accessibility for some consumers Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 R E T H I N K I N G T H E AU T H E N T I C / C O M M E R C I A L B I N AR Y to have production capacities in their own hands. Not surprisingly, then, there has been a move within fields traditionally associated with organizations, representations and cultural practices to reconceptualize creativity within the context of convergence
the convergence of media screens and practices, the convergence of the public and the private and the convergence of ideologies within culture ranging from individualism to collectivity. Indeed, the concept of convergence itself is one that crucially involves creativity, because to have, or experience, convergence necessarily means the creative intersection, overlap and relationship between two or more forms (whether these be media screens, cultural ideologies or labour practices). Re-imagining the cultural value of creativity and authenticity has not only attracted the attention of savvy marketers and urban planners; media and Cultural Studies scholars have also focused on new practices of consumer creativity. Some of the same strategies that marketers and branders have recently re-tooled to more effectively reach contemporary consumers (including, but not limited to, things like global networks of communication, shifting practices of labour, with a renewed focus on ‘immaterial labor’ and changing practices of consumption, with an emphasis on ‘user or consumer generated content’), have also mobilized cultural researchers and scholars to re-imagine research questions and subjects of inquiry. Cultural phenomena such as media interactivity, social media and convergence culture, as well as heightened practices of surveillance and visibility and new understandings of fair use and copyright rules, have encouraged scholars from a variety of ideological and theoretical positions to re-value what is meant by creativity. Theorizations of such convergences vary from Bolter and Grusin’s (2000) ‘remediation’ and Lev Manovich’s (2002) ‘language of new media’ to Henry Jenkins’ (2006) ‘convergence culture’. Jenkins, for instance, defines convergence as ‘the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want’ (Jenkins 2006, p. 2). Again, my focus in this essay has a different entry point in terms of convergence, one that perhaps implies not so much a flow of content across media platforms, or cooperation between multiple media industries, but rather attempts to discern what other convergences
in media, urban spaces, material culture and cultural ideologies
these connections might obscure. Not all convergences utilize creativity in the same way, with the same cultural impact. We need alternative understandings of convergence from media convergence as a way to understand the contradictions as well as the possibilities within convergence culture. If we are to understand current practices of creativity and creative industries in the logic of the current moment, we need to rethink old vocabularies and grammars that have been used to describe creative production. In particular, we need a rethinking of the concepts of creative authenticity and inauthenticity as these are articulated, strategized and 643 Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 644 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S experienced in the emergent mode of capitalist production that involves, among other things, changing networks of cultural intermediaries (such as marketers, branders and street artists). This is not to say that the role of corporate or commercial culture is ignored within theories of convergence culture, but it is to say that in many accounts, the economic role that commercial culture plays in convergence is downplayed, so that the relationship between creative practices and commercial culture is often considered as a cooperation rather than a kind of competition in which some creative practices are obscured at the expense of others. This dynamic of power is exemplified in the ways in which particular street artists (and their art) in the current cultural economy are branded and marketed, while others are mobilized as counter-brands, critiquing the very economy that authorizes them in the first place. Here, I am interested in how these power relations shape definitions of cultural value, creativity and convergence itself in the contemporary political economy of the USA. Graffiti, street art and creative convergence There are a number of reasons that street art is a particularly useful optic to understand the various contradictions of convergence within changing values of creativity and the creative industries in contemporary US culture. Street art cannot be read as simply a sign of urban decay and rebellious youth, nor is it a pure form of cultural innovation. Broadly, street art is art in the historical tradition of graffiti, murals and tagging, that is painted, stencilled, stickered or pasted on public spaces
walls, trains, fences, etc.
that is clearly understood by its producers as art and not advertising. Graffiti emerges as a cultural art form in the USA in the late 1960s and early 1970s in direct relationship to other cultural dynamics, primarily the increasing ubiquity of advertising and the economic recession that characterized this time period in the USA (Austin 2001, Snyder 2009). Graffiti and street art have engaged in a struggle over the meaning of public space and the role of creative production within this space; as historian Joe Austin puts it, graffiti needs to be understood as a particular part of the proliferation of advertisements, signs, and brand names that were ever-present in urban US cities throughout the twentieth century (Austin 2001, p. 39). I situate street art within the cultural economy of the twentyfirst century USA and the increasing normativity of brand culture, which both exploits and capitalizes on the play of residual and emergent meanings of this creative practice. In as much as commercial culture poaches the ‘urban cool’ signifiers from street and graffiti artists as a way to attach this sentiment to products, street and graffiti artists’ creative productions and personal identities are in turn shaped by the conventions of commercial culture, especially in terms of brand logics and strategies (Austin 2001). This kind of negotiation and Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 R E T H I N K I N G T H E AU T H E N T I C / C O M M E R C I A L B I N AR Y struggle between these two cultural forms provides us with a slightly different insight into convergence culture. To this end, communication scholar Lisa Henderson’s concept of ‘relay’ provides a useful analytic to think through the entangled discourses of the creative industries, convergence culture and cultural productions such as street art. Writing about tensions between commercial and non-commercial queer cultural production, Henderson uses ‘relay’ as a way to produce critique of these dynamics, one which ‘multiplies and redirects determination in favor of determinisms and other, more reciprocal forms of influence. It imagines a historical braid of changing production conditions and the virtual hunger of commercial systems for subcultural energy and artistry’ (Henderson 2008, p. 571). The cultural factors that structure, organize, (de)legitimate and then (re)legitimate, authorize and make legible street art clearly situate this creative practice as an important element of contemporary convergence culture. These cultural factors include the ways in which power and ideologies structure and facilitate particular convergences over others, how new technological forms are accompanied by attendant new configurations of labour and labour practices, and how cultural dynamics of aesthetics and creativity in public and private spaces become imbricated in new economic convergences. Focusing on street art, then, allows for a re-reading of the relationship between parallel industries
commercial, artistic
that is not always about the mutual benefit of each, but is rather about the ways in which certain kinds of convergences rely on the erasure of non-commercial public space. To return to Henderson’s notion of cultural ‘relay’, convergence culture is not so much an unproblematic overlapping of cultural production, industries and ideologies, but rather a redirection of particular cultural determinisms that is enabled by a contemporary recoding of social domains as economic ones. Surely, as Henderson readily acknowledges, ‘relay’ does not apply to all commercial cultural production: there are clear ways in which the language of market determination and appropriation do, in fact, explain and define much contemporary creative production (Henderson 2008). Yet, street art is an artistic practice that shifts and expands within changing political-economic conditions, and is an example of ‘subcultural energy and artistry’ that corporate culture longs to appropriate as a selling strategy. Indeed, reimagining convergence through the metaphor of Henderson’s braid allows us to find traction in thinking in more complex ways about how creativity is understood and experienced within the contemporary moment. What is at stake in acknowledging the convergence between these forms of creativity and commerce? What must we give up, or what might be gained, if we acknowledge convergence as a complicated and often contradictory historical braid? Creativity and authenticity are not situated here as players in a zero-sum game
changing definitions of the value of creativity necessarily mean a retreat from either a focus on crass corporate appropriation or a ‘real’ kind of 645 Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 646 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S art one can only find in non-commercial spaces. Rather, street art gives us purchase in thinking about changing definitions of value because of the way in which these creative practices refuse an easy position as either predominantly about the consumer cultural industries or about non-commercial aesthetic cultural production. Because the context for street art is the city, or the urban space, and given that many urban cities are aggressively re-branding themselves as ‘creative’, through public
private partnerships, hiring marketers to ‘sell cities’, and creating quantitative matrices for measuring levels of creativity (based on things such as the number of art galleries, coffee shops and even the density of gay population), the presence of creative visual representation in city spaces that so often signals the ‘urban’ can be understood as a way to parse out particular convergences (Florida 2002, Greenberg, 2008). For reasons that I elaborate below, street art defines convergence in a way: part of the contemporary landscape of street art is the ways in which these practices are so effectively corporatized; yet, street artists often use the walls of the street in distinctly opposite ways than corporate culture, and frequently articulate specific politicized end goals. For this reason, a final rationale for using street art as a lens through which to examine changing values of creativity is the historical nature of this practice. In particular, I am interested in how street art in the contemporary moment borrows from and re-tools more traditional capitalist branding strategies as part of both representation and politics. Consider, for example, the various city ordinances in urban centres around the USA in the 1970s and 1980s that criminalized graffiti and street art as a violation of public space
a criminalization that often took shape in racist and classed forms of policing particular subjects (think of the revitalization of Times Square, in New York City in the 1980s, e.g. Austin 2001, Greenberg 2008, Snyder 2009).3 The ‘graffiti problem’ that plagued urban cities in the USA during the 1970s and 1980s was largely attributed (by government officials, the mainstream media and citizens) as one of an out-of-control youth population, most of whom were youth of colour, who had ‘no respect’ for their immediate environs (Austin 2001). However, with the emergence of public
private partnerships within cities, as well as the general corporatization of cities, the ‘graffiti problem’ became, at least for some marketers, a way to harness ‘street’ creativity as part of a new way to image-market cities. In the twenty-first century, street art, a clear descendent of graffiti, became a more normalized art form. While, like graffiti, street art is often an illegal and secretive practice (and some artists, such as Banksy, have built their own brand on maintaining a secret identity), it is also more mainstream than graffiti, combining graffiti writing with pop art. The seemingly contradictory quality of street art
its simultaneous reliance on both a kind of ‘dangerous’ street cred and its insistence on sustaining a ‘legitimate’ place in contemporary culture
has caught the attention of high end art galleries and auction houses like Sotheby’s (where Banksy art sells for Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 R E T H I N K I N G T H E AU T H E N T I C / C O M M E R C I A L B I N AR Y anywhere between $10,000 and $200,000). Sanctioned graffiti and street art was newly seen (at least by city planners) as evidence of the grit and character of urban centres like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and was incorporated as part of the logic of branding creative cities. For instance, in 2009, street artist Shepard Fairey collaborated with Levis to design a street-art inspired line centred around his clothing brand, Obey. As part of the New York City Times Square inauguration of this collaboration, Fairey put up posters of his art and tagged the Obey logo on the street outside the store (designboom.com). Levi’s sponsored the clothing collaboration and also the actual practice of creating street art as a way to highlight not only the actual Levi’s brand, but also Fairey’s own creative brand
in Times Square, which is now routinely celebrated as a family friendly spot in part because of the assiduous removal of graffiti by the city government alongside the (racialized) removal of other ‘unwholesome’ city sights such as pornography and prostitution. Yet, part of the reason Fairey makes an attractive partner for Levi’s urban brand is the fact that Fairey has been arrested some 14
16 times for defacing public property (a fact which the artist cites often as evidence of his street authenticity), and his street art frequently trenchantly critiques issues ranging from capitalism to anti-immigration policies to the environment (Banet-Weiser and Sturken 2010). The cultural trajectory of the value of graffiti and street art as important creative elements in a city allow us to trace and map this history. The city and the self-brand Shifts in the wide-ranging practices of the contemporary cultural economy signal a powerful turn in the modes, meanings and available spaces of creativity.4 Inderpal Grewal, in her thinking through the complexities of current flows of transnational capital and consumer products, states: ‘Why certain products sell and others don’t raises important issues of culture, identity and subjectivity. The cultural work required to create consumer desire for a product is not as simple as producing a marketing plan; rather, the plan contributes to and participates in wider cultural changes within which the product can become meaningful (or not) in ways that often cannot be predicted’ (Grewal 2005, p. 87, my italics). Within this framework, I’d like to explore the ‘‘wider cultural changes’’ that provide the backdrop for street art. The contours of the contemporary cultural economy
a ‘wide cultural change’ over the past several decades
allow not only for particular kinds of creative expression to be branded ‘authentically’, but also for a particular kind of public/private convergence to become legible. Importantly, these shifts in economic conditions of production are accompanied by shifts in the relationship between the state, the market and 647 Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 648 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S the individual; shifts marked by the ‘reinvention’ of government through a rejection of historical liberal practices (such as social welfare and public services; Rose 1990, Harvey 2005, Hay and Oullette 2008). An element of this reinvention is the increasing normativity of brand logics and strategies in urban planning and city development, where the emergence of brand culture and everyday individual practices within brand culture provides the context for contemporary convergences of the creative industries in the urban city (Arviddson 2006). By this I mean not only the ubiquity of brands as part of a visual and cultural landscape, but also that the retraction of state and public services characteristic of contemporary culture enables a ‘freeing’ of individuals from a dependent relationship on the state, thus not only authorizing but also normalizing the practice of self-branding as a logical way to craft individual identity. This kind of marketization of social life and the individual has meant that contemporary economic practices have been reimagined in efforts to reach individuals in ways previously deployed by the state or culture. The self-branded individual thus becomes the key actor within this context, expressed not only through a retreat from collectivity and public resources, but also as individual entrepreneurialism. The branded city The contemporary cultural economic context has authorized certain practices of ‘branding the city’ through creative industries. As Miriam Greenberg details in Branding New York, the political, economic and cultural shift in the USA from New Deal-style liberalism to the rise of a free market ideology ‘led most cities to turn to a new, entrepreneurial mode of economic development that combined political and economic restructuring with cultural strategies like image marketing’ (Greenberg 2008, p. 36). This mode of development included public
private partnerships and ties to government restructuring and economic developments in cities. This economic shift, while revitalizing cities in particular ways, also shifted resources and priorities away from public and social services of cities, such as housing, public sector employment, maintaining working-class and non-white neighbourhoods. As Greenberg states, the priorities of branded cities like New York, ‘shift from the provision of tangible use-values to the projection of intangible exchange-values, and the city itself is increasingly transformed from a real place of value and meaning to residents and workers to an abstract space for capital investment and profitmaking, and a commodity for broader consumption’ (Greenberg 2008, p. 36). Yet, these two functions of a city
a ‘real place of value and meaning to residents and workers’ and an ‘abstract space for capital investment’ and commodity consumption
are not necessarily oppositional in branded cities; street and graffiti artists, for example, often straddle this line. In the context of twenty-first century transitions in the political and cultural economy, the gradual shift to brand cities in the later part of the Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 R E T H I N K I N G T H E AU T H E N T I C / C O M M E R C I A L B I N AR Y twentieth century makes way for the emergence of what urban planner Florida (2002) and others call the ‘creative class’, one that nurtures and allows for collaborations between and within industries such as advertising and street art. While these dynamics hardly seem new, what has shifted is the way in which this economy has enabled the branding of creativity and authenticity. Florida’s promoting of ‘creative cities’ and a creative workforce is a clear example of a kind of urban branding, a practice characterized by Greenberg as ‘something that is at once visual and material, and combines intensive marketing
in this case place marketing
with neoliberal political and economic restructuring’ (Greenberg 2008). As scholars such as Greenberg, Angela McRobbie and Jamie Peck have pointed out, part of this ‘economic restructuring’ indicates the erasure of all those who do not clearly fall into a definition of the ‘creative class’: the working poor, immigrants, service workers, or those marginalized in term of material or cultural inequalities and changing labour relations (McRobbie 2004, Peck 2005, Greenberg 2008). The economic restructuring from which the creative city emerges means a further retreat from public and state obligation to those who are not recognized as creative, and a simultaneous privatization of traditional public resources and spaces that are authorized as part of the creative city. That is, the idea that there is a ‘creative class’ is specifically marketed. Creativity itself is organized as a kind of brand, complete with consultants and brand managers to make a city more ‘creative’ and thus increase tourist revenues and city reputation (McRobbie 2004, Peck 2005, Banet-Weiser and Sturken 2010). The city space occupied by street art, and claimed by street artists, then, is one that has already been branded by contemporary culture as not only authentic but an important element of the Florida’s creative class. If brand culture is the primary context for contemporary creative production such as street art and individual identities such as the street artist, attention shifts from focusing on whether or not the state should provide resources for art and culture as support for artists to individual, branded street artists for whom authentic creativity itself is a brand. By arguing this, I intend not to expose street art (or the artists themselves) as hypocritical or corrupt, but to articulate capitalism’s twinning of the branding of creativity and the authentic. Street art, graffiti, tagging and muralism are all different forms of art; they use different materials, have different end goals and are understood differently by a variety of audiences (and in media-saturated contexts, it is often difficult to discern differences between different forms of art, including commercial expression such as advertising). As one contemporary street artist, Ritzy P, defines it: to me street art is a term to cover art that is from and/or in the streets beyond graffiti since that has its own specific definition but does also include it. In the past years since ‘street art’ has been the term du jour, it seems artists that might only do stencils or wheat pasting for instance, all seem to respect and know the basic history of graffiti and have figured out 649 650 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 a medium to communicate their personal ideas in the streets. All of it to me seems to have a certain aesthetic and vibe, a non verbal understanding of the essence of the hustle and grind of the streets (Ritzy P., personal correspondence with author, February 11, 2010). Clearly, the definition of street art is encompassing; though just as clearly, street artists define it in ways that are in distinct opposition to advertising
it is an aesthetic and a vibe, something that is created often without permission, or, as streetartist DJ/LA says, ‘any expression that transcends that need for attention only factor. gotta have some love behind it’ (DJ/LA, personal correspondence with author, February 11, 2010). Greenberg, discussing graffiti in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, argues that the difference between graffiti and commercial culture is in part about this need for attention: in advertising, the goal is ever-greater commodity recognition, whereas for graffiti writers ‘whose activities were illegal and for whom survival depended on official anonymity, name recognition was an end in itself, or as Norman Mailer put it famously: ‘‘the name was the faith of graffiti’’’ (Greenberg 2008, p. 64). Related to street art’s distinction from advertising, the ‘love’ that is behind street art often comes in the form of pointed political critiques, especially those critiques that use the street to question, mock and critique its commercial uses, such as advertising. Artists from Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring to Jennifer Holzer and Barbara Kruger have asked people, in various ways, to be critical and question the world around them. These artists as well as others used creative practice as a particular articulation of struggle over forms of cultural expression and uses of public space
and it is precisely this struggle, not its resolution, that characterizes convergence culture. Even within the branded city, then, street artists often use creative practice to create a ‘counter-brand’, one that rejects and critiques the increasing privatization of city resources and shrinking public spaces. The rejection or challenge to rights to public space, expressed through artistic creativity, is not necessarily outside the contours of brand culture, but rather works as a kind of convergence within the branded city. Perhaps the most well-known contemporary street artist, Banksy, creates art that deliberately questions the role of public space in capitalist societies, calling his street art ‘brandalism’, as a commentary on the ways in which advertisers are granted access to public spaces in the name of profit, while artists are punished for using the same spaces under rubrics of trademark or copyright violation or vandalism. Yet, the 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop is titled ‘A Banksy film’ and chronicles, among other things, the brand of Banksy himself. Consider another example, the Wooster Collective, founded in New York in 2001, and ‘dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world’ (woostercollective.com). Their website features events (ranging from museum exhibitions to photos of new street art), asks viewers for feedback on Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 R E T H I N K I N G T H E AU T H E N T I C / C O M M E R C I A L B I N AR Y what to include in the site, and solicits input about design. The collective nature of the group indicates it is not a top-down organization. Rather, it celebrates unknown and emerging artists, and encourages critique of advertising and uses of the street for profit. Yet, the Wooster Collective is clearly a brand in and of itself. The brand of a self-run, independent collective might have a different end goal (such as sustaining the collective) than that of corporate street art, but the logic of branding remains the same. The website offers collections of street art for sale, it asks viewers to ‘become a fan’ of the Wooster Collective on the social network site Facebook, features links with other affiliations and artists, and lists ways viewers can find the collective on sites such as Twitter. As these examples bear out, despite the conceptual and ideological differences between street art and advertising, the relationship between these two aesthetic forms is not one of polar opposites. Rather, this relationship is a kind of convergence between creativity and commerce, one that is particularly enabled by the branding of creativity and the authentic. Thus, one cultural narrative circulating among street artists concerns ‘reclaiming the streets’, in which street art is an act of rebellion against the bullying power of commercial interests
such as Florida-inspired strategies to make a city more creative. Yet reclaiming the streets has a market value on its own. Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Winton claims the LA-based tagger crew MTA has firmly established its brand within the cultural marketplace of urban street art. Describing the leader of the MTA, a street artist called Smear, selling street art to collectors, Winton reports ‘[there] is so much demand for street art right now’ (Winton, 1/9/09). This demand not only recognizes the aesthetics of street art, but is also a market demand, a demand for those artists and groups, such as MTA, who ‘have made a name for themselves’ in the branded world of street art. As Cedar Lewisohn states about the political motivations of London street artists, ‘They are in competition with the fly posters and advertisers. They also know that as soon as they put their work up on the street, the advertisers and marketers are going to attempt to appropriate their ideas. So the street artist in London must build a defence-shield against corporate theft. It’s a constant catand-mouse game of artists innovating and advertisers assimilating’ (Lewisohn 2008, p. 65). In contemporary brand culture, however, the idea that corporate players are focused on blatantly appropriating the ideas of street artists, who are clearly the mice in this ‘cat-and-mouse’ game, does not have the same purchase. The myth of the ‘innovative’ artist and the ‘assimilative’ advertiser breaks down when the artists become the advertisers. The new game is one of competing for representation. Street artists are not just competing with advertising, they are also competing with the police and with gangs and their own social invisibility. In other words, there is no street art without graffiti and tagging, there is no street art without murals and there is no street art without advertising. Within this context, street art cultivates and nurtures an authentic/commercial divide: it resists the corporate consumerism to which 651 Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 652 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S street artists (along with all other people) are asked to commit; it challenges corporate and governmental efforts to contain and control creativity; it both buys into and challenges a culture of anxiety about authenticity by engaging in illegal practices that are specifically not sanctioned by commercial institutions. Seen from this angle, street art is one way of claiming space in the contemporary US environment where every space is taken up, expanded, and re-imagined by ‘convergence culture’ and specifically branded as authentic. This process is not new, though it has a heightened inflection in contemporary culture. Indeed, in terms of the creative industries, part of the image marketing of an urban space involves navigating tensions between corporate sponsorship of the arts and culture and maintaining a sense of ‘authenticity’ to the arts
especially to those creative practices such as street art. Brand marketers have quickly addressed these kinds of tensions about losing ‘authenticity’, crafting business models that transform authenticity into a brand strategy. The move to brand authenticity and to structure it as part of a business plan is one in which experiences, and importantly, the emotions that accompany experiences, can be understood as a distinct economic offering. As marketers Gilmore and Pine explain in their 2007 book, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, in the contemporary economy, businesses have to develop new strategies and management expertise: ‘Organizations today must learn to understand, manage, and excel at rendering authenticity. Indeed, ‘‘rendering authenticity’’ should one day roll trippingly off the tongue as easily as ‘‘controlling costs’’ and ‘‘improving quality’’. . .’ (Gilmore and Pine 2007, p. 3, italics in original). This rendering of authenticity as a specific business imperative, enabled by contemporary capitalist practices, is precisely mobilized as a particular convergence in urban cities between creativity and commerce. It is within this cultural economic context that contemporary street artists are located: the streets that are the canvasses of street artists are understood as potentially ‘creative’, and thus are involved in how authenticity and creativity are branded. However, like other subjects within contemporary brand culture, the street and graffiti artist must be managed and governed in particular ways so as not to lose ‘authenticity’ while at the same time not threatening the business model of the branded city. The brand of the self Within the context of the branded city, certain street artists maintain an ‘authentic’ aura to their creative productions precisely because authenticity is part of the brand. The anxiety potentially caused by the convergence of creativity with commerce (‘selling out’) is assuaged within the contemporary moment, where street artists’ cultural labour is performed in public spaces that are nonetheless branded. Brand culture is enabled and supported by convergences such as the authentic and commercial precisely by decentering Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 R E T H I N K I N G T H E AU T H E N T I C / C O M M E R C I A L B I N AR Y consuming products as the crucial act of consumption, and highlighting cultural practices as consumptive spaces in which individuals are ‘free’ to practice politics, articulate lifestyles and engage in creative acts (Foucault 1988, Lemke 2001). The street artist is, in other words, the enterprising subject, a free agent unfettered by ties to the state or social responsibilities (Rose 1990, Foucault 1997). Crucial to the convergence of creativity and commercial culture is, ironically, the maintenance of a distinction between authenticity and the commercial, especially in terms of crafting personal identity that is expressed as a kind of ‘freedom’ from state power. Maintaining the distinction between authentic creativity and commercialized industry in turn maintains the idea that there is a space outside of the market in which authenticity can take root and flourish, a cultural space that has somehow escaped capitalism’s bold, unapologetic strategies and bullying. Within this context, individuals are charged with servicing their own needs and entrepreneurial ambitions, outside the realm of state responsibility and obligation (Lemke 2001). The street artist is one such individual, where the entrepreneurialism and innovation of the artist, previously understood and practiced as a cultural, or political practice (one that is only economic out of necessity), is situated within an enterprising cultural context, one in which artistic endeavours can be seen as particular kinds of ‘freedoms’ in the marketing or branding of the self. Branding oneself is an increasingly normative practice (especially in the USA) which is deployed by individuals to communicate personal values, ideas and beliefs using strategies and logic from commercial brand culture (Hearn 2008, Banet-Weiser 2011). Street artists brand themselves through their art, personal logos, social media and websites, among others, as a way to enter into a circuit of commodity exchange. To think of street artists as enterprising individuals
as selfbrands
forces us to think more deeply about how, and in what ways, the relationship between the market and the individual works: the contemporary cultural economy authorizes particular individuals (such as street artists) to be entrepreneurs, and particular creative productions (such as street art) as brands. This form of convergence is a relationship of struggle, necessity and mutual benefit. Within contemporary capitalism, and its attendant practices of constant surveillance and technological access, street art has evolved, just as the parameters that define the creative economy have also evolved. Social, political, economic and environmental issues that in previous eras might have been coded as progressive, or even radical, such as anti-consumerism or antiglobalization, have become more mainstream rather than obfuscated by dominant culture; indeed, current capitalist practices accommodate particular moral and political agendas of ‘creatives’. Street artists, in their attempts to reclaim city space, operate using similar strategies as those of branding companies: making one’s personal mark on the environment, using ‘logos’ which are instantly recognizable by other street artists, and investing in a 653 Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 654 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S particular cultural visibility. In addition to these visual and material conventions of brand culture, a broader and more diffused logic about the ‘freedom’ to be creative and an individual entrepreneur has shaped contemporary street artists and their cultural productions. The appropriation of aspects of branding is of a different sort than the corporate appropriation lamented by scholars in different historical eras; rather, it is about competing regimes of value within a promotional brand culture. Within this context, the counter-culturalism and anti-consumerism of street artists is not necessarily an oppositional gesture to dominant culture, but is rather about establishing the brand of authenticity and unfettered creativity. Conclusion In summer, 2005, the Sony Corporation hired young street artists to paint on urban buildings various stylized, anime-inspired images of kids using oversized versions of their hand-held game system, the PlayStation Portable (PSP). The street artists used stencil graffiti, where stencils were taped to the wall, spray painted, and then quickly removed, on wall spaces Sony rented, for a two week period, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Atlanta and Miami. In what seemed to be an attempt to capture an urban, street-art style, the images were of wide-eyed, slouchy youths in baggy clothes and wearing baseball caps backwards, playing with the PSP in a variety of ways: riding it like a pony, licking it like a lollipop, playing paddleball with it. Sony’s name is not in the images. Apparently desperate to both reach and expand new youth markets, Sony’s campaign targeted ‘urban nomads’, who Sony spokesperson Patrick Seybold described as young ‘consumers who are enjoying their entertainment on-the-go in an artistic and creative way’ (Musgrove 2005). Corporate graffiti is not a new phenomenon
the attempt to ‘capture the streets’ by promoting products such as the PSP using similar aesthetic practices as graffiti artists, taggers and street artists can be included in a long list of corporate attempts to capitalize on the urban, hip, youth market. There are a number of critiques that surround corporate graffiti: this kind of practice is not ‘real’ art; it is purely commercial; it capitalizes on urban neighbourhoods by using racist images in pathetic attempts to appear hip (Singel 2005). A more interesting critique, however, is to situate graffiti and street art as a particular manifestation of convergence culture. Street art provides a useful lens through which to rethink what is meant by convergence culture in the first place: the boundaries between art and commerce have arguably always been blurred, so what is it about contemporary creative culture that affords a different perspective? I have argued here that the increasing presence of brand cultures in the USA provides a context for authorizing and defining street art as a convergence of a variety of different realms: the public and private, the Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 R E T H I N K I N G T H E AU T H E N T I C / C O M M E R C I A L B I N AR Y independent and mainstream, the artistic self and the brand. A rethinking of convergence culture in this context means a shift in perspective. Contemporary convergence culture as it applies to street art does not indicate corporate appropriation or cool hunting, where urban expressions are marketed and sold as commodities. Nor does it indicate a cooperative mapping of the realms of commerce and art in the space of the city, resulting in a smooth, unproblematic partnership and a newfound consumer agency. Rather, contemporary convergence culture needs to be interrogated not only for what it authorizes in terms of new understandings of culture and the individual, but also what other convergences these power dynamics obscure. Convergence culture is, among other things, about a broader, more transformative process of creativity itself as a brand. Contemporary street artists, as brands themselves endowed with shifting definitions of creativity, individualism and entrepreneurialism, are logical distributors of this brand. Street art occupies different spaces within brand culture
and maintaining the difference in these spaces as oppositional is absolutely crucial to contemporary capitalist practices. Challenging the historically oppositional claims of the authentic/commercial binary, and theorizing the relationship between these as a convergence wherein individuals locate themselves and are located differently depending on specific cultural conditions, allows us to see how this convergence itself is not only enabled by contemporary capitalism, but indeed is a crucial element to the logic of capitalism. To invoke Henderson (2008) again, we should attend to the relay between and within these commodity contexts as a way to appreciate street art’s spaces of possibility as well as to understand how convergence culture can work to foreclose other possibilities. Convergence within the space of culture implies a power dynamic wherein residual and emergent modes of creativity and capitalism authorizes the branding of authentic creativity as well as the self. The branding of the authentic, in this context, is not understood as an oxymoron or hypocritical, but rather normative in the contemporary neoliberal cultural economy in the USA. Understanding convergence culture in a broader perspective will enable not only a richer understanding of the ways in which power operates within culture
that is, what it is ‘converging’ in contemporary culture
but also to understand the deeper divergences and inequalities upon which that convergence depends. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank a number of people for their helpful ideas on this essay: Josh Kun, Inna Arzumanova, Melissa Brough, Cara Wallis, Laura Portwood-Stacer, Daniela Baroffio and Henry Jenkins, as well as the co-editors of this issue, James Hay and Nick Couldry. Permission to reprint some 655 656 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S material published elsewhere has been granted as follows ‘‘The Politics of Commerce: Shepard Fairey and the New Cultural Entrepreneurship’’ by Sarah Banet-Weiser and Marita Sturken, in Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture, eds. Melissa Aronczyk and Devon Powers, New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishers, 2010. Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 Notes 1 2 3 4 The ‘explosion’ in street art in the early twenty-first century is welldocumented in the 2010 Banksy film, Exit Through the Gift Shop. For more on Shepard Fairey as a cultural entrepreneur, please see Banet-Weiser and Marita Sturken (2010). The definition of street art varies depending on sources. It is beyond the scope of this essay to detail the differences between graffiti, street art, tagging, muralism, etc. I focus here on street art because the relationship between street art and advertising relies on some shared similarities, despite the varied differences between these aesthetic forms. I define street art as art that is painted, stencilled, stickered or pasted on public spaces
walls, trains, fences, etc.
that is clearly understood by its producers as art and not advertising. On the website streetsy.com, dedicated to a ‘group conversation about street art and related topics’, they offer this as a definition: ‘Street art is art created in public places, often without permission. Street art is made in a number of mediums, including stencils, stickers, posters, paint, and sculpture. In mathematical, political, criminal, and philosophical terms, street art is a subset of graffiti’ (streetsy.com). Indeed, as part of revitalization efforts the penalty for graffiti in the city of New York during this period moved from a misdemeanour to a felony (Greenberg, Austin). Certainly, the distinction between the authentic and commercial is not new (indeed, Henderson calls it a ‘centuries-long standoff’ (Henderson 2008, p. 569). However, the way in which it is authorized and enabled in the contemporary neoliberal economy is somewhat shifted from previous eras. Notes on contributor Sarah Banet-Weiser is Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (1999) and Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (2007). She is the co-editor of the volumes Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (2007) and Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (2011). Her forthcoming book, AuthenticTM: The R E T H I N K I N G T H E AU T H E N T I C / C O M M E R C I A L B I N AR Y Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, explores how branding has expanded beyond conventional marketing and into lifestyles, identities and culture itself. Downloaded by [USC University of Southern California] at 22:39 07 March 2015 References Arvidsson, A. (2006) Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture, New York, Routledge. Austin, J. (2001) Taking the Train: How Grafitti Art became an Urban Crisis in New York City, New York, Columbia University Press. Banet-Weiser, S. (2011) ‘Branding the Post-Feminist Self: Girls’ Video Production and YouTube’, in Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls’ Media Culture, ed. M. C. Kearney, New York, Peter Lang, pp. 277
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