In Defence of Street Art

Ai Wei Wei projection graffiti, Hong Kong. Photo by Cpak Ming

This month, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles opened a new exhibition on the history of street art and graffiti, the first such show at a major American museum. It has been greeted by controversy. One of the curators has been accused of having a commercial conflict of interest and street artists have accused the museum of censoring one of the graffiti murals it commissioned.

The exhibition has also suffered from broad-based attacks on its very subject matter. Last week, City Journal published a lengthy attack by Manhattan Institute fellow Heather MacDonald, whose argument against the show can be summarized as follows: graffiti is a cancer that destroys cities, yet it has been embraced by hypocritical cultural elites who rarely suffer the consequence of is damage. She seems utterly offended that a major art museum would consider mounting a show dedicated to vandalism.

Leaving aside a minute the fact that the Manhattan Institute is a think tank that promotes “greater economic choice and individual responsibility” — a euphemism for the neo-liberal policies that have dismantled social programs and financial regulations and ushered in an era of economic instability and a growing wealth gap — MacDonald’s piece is worth considering because it makes use of so many of the most common arguments against street art. To start, she trots out that tired old workhorse, the broken-windows theory, which suggests that any instance of neglect or disrepair in an urban neighbourhood will lead to higher crime rates and a breakdown of social order. MacDonald uses it to illustrate graffiti’s effect on cities:

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Tunnel Vision: Subway Zoetrope

I first noticed subway tunnel wall animations in Boston, where the long gaps between stations on the MBTA Red Line provides a captive audience. The animation, composed of dozens of stills that simulated movement as the train zoomed by, was an ad. The message: visit Vermont and its great outdoors, which certainly must have resonated with more than a few claustrophobes riding the crowded rush hour rails.

Animated ads in subway tunnels are expensive, both to design and install, which helps explain why the Vermont ad’s successor, a campaign for a movie “coming to theatres” last February, was only removed recently — with no ready replacement. But the medium is a popular one, if only because it’s relatively novel and rare. Examples from Budapest, Hong Kong, Kiev, L.A., Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. have been enthusiastically documented for upload to YouTube. And given that cash-strapped transit agencies have allowed almost every other subway surface to be colonized by ad space, including seats and whole exteriors of rolling stock, it was almost a logical next step.

Much of the credit for introducing these flipbook or zoetrope-like ads goes to two independent innovators: New York astrophysics student Joshua Spodek and Winnipeg animator Bradley Caruk. Spodek’s ads debuted in Atlanta in 2001; his company, Sub Media, continues to produce similar ads today. In 2006, Caruk won a Manning Innovation Award for his concept, which his partner, Rob Walker, first thought up while staring at the blank walls of Paris’ Metro. The company they co-founded, SideTrack Technologies, set up its first system in Kuala Lumpur and has since opened others across the United States — and beyond, to London, Rio de Janeiro, and cities in Mexico.

Caruk’s system, which relies on motion-sensitive LEDs, made subway advertising widespread and profitable. The MBTA raked in $1.5 million in SideTrack’s first two years of operation in Boston, and one ad alone brought the L.A. Metro the equivalent of 192,000 new riders in revenue. But he was hardly the first person to experiment with subway animation.

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Off Hollywood Boulevard

Former Mark Twain Hotel on Wilcox Avenue, Los Angeles

Former home of Macintosh Clothes
and Newberry School of Beauty, Los Angeles

Empty L.A.

The density of urban slums once drove city planners and social workers mad — and, in some cases, still does today. But perhaps because of the vicious crime that followed mass abandonment of cities like Detroit, or the specter, for the first time, of an entire city’s virtual erasure in the wake of Hiroshima, the empty, depopulated city has inspired more horror in the last sixty years.

In the original (1953) film version of The War of the Worlds, Los Angeles is almost completely evacuated to await its doom. The philosophical 2001 film Vanilla Sky opens with a nightmare sequence in which the main character wakes up to an empty Manhattan. Alan Weisman’s recent book The World Without Us detailed precisely what would happen to the built environment over time if people really did disappear from cities.

Limited disappearance has even been used as a tool to stress the catastrophic consequences of a particular category of person vanishing, as in the 1922 Austrian novel and subsequent film The City Without Jews (a shocking anticipation of Nazi anti-Semitism), or the 2004 film A Day Without a Mexican.

These apocalyptic precedents are what first came to mind upon first encountering photographer Matthew Logue’s new collection, Empty L.A.

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LA Art Walk

Los Angeles’s spin on the Art Walk serves more than just the obvious purposes of promoting foot traffic and celebrating art in the flatland of mini malls and gas guzzlers. The monthly spectacle constitutes a larger urban project: the gentrification and “revitalization” of Downtown LA.

Since Antonio Villaraigosa’s first term in office, the LA mayor has worked with the City Council in redeveloping the desolate city center with a billion-dollar makeover. In recent decades Downtown has devolved from a bustling business hub to a destitute ghost town, where by day careerists flood the skyscraper landscape and by night rush to their suburban pockets leaving a nocturnal community of itinerants. The homeless population in Downtown LA alone exceeded 30,000 in 2004.

Today, the district lies in continual renovation and the lines blur between skid row and Gallery Row. Million-dollar lofts overlook boulevards dotted by sleeping bags and cardboard boxes. There is literally no street in the 5-square-mile area without an old warehouse or hotel from the Roaring Twenties converted into contemporary, luxury residence.

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Where Latinos Speak Korean

Se habla español in LA’s Koreatown. Photo by Hunhee.

Multiculturalism is usually framed in terms of the relationship between immigrants and a “host society.” But what about the relationship between immigrants themselves? In Los Angeles’ sprawling Koreatown, a growing population of Latino immigrants is leading to a cultural and linguistic exchange that is unprecedented in recent American history.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal describes the trend: “At the Galleria, a large Korean supermarket here, store manager Yoonah Yoon greets Hispanic cashiers and bag boys each morning with a hearty ‘buenos dias’—’good morning’ in Spanish. The Latino workers, who make up more than half the store’s 162 employees, answer him with the equivalent greeting in Korean: ‘Ahn-nyung-hah-seh-yo.’”

Korean immigrants began settling along Wilshire Boulevard in the 1960s, gradually establishing a vast Korean neighbourhood that eventually became the epicentre of the world’s largest Korean community outside of Asia. Eventually, most of the neighbourhood’s Korean residents decamped for other neighbourhoods and suburbs around Los Angeles, motivated in no small part by the 1992 riots that targeted Korean-owned businesses above all. Over the course of the 1990s, Koreatown became home to a new wave of immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Despite the area’s changing demographics, Koreatown remained the most important hub of commerce and culture for the Los Angeles Korean community. In fact, in recent years, Korean investment in the neighbourhood has increased, including the construction in 2001 of a $40-million Korean spa and a new Korean shopping mall.

That’s where things get interesting. Many of these Korean businesses draw their employees (and, in some cases, customers) from the surrounding area’s largely Latino population. The relationship is such that many Koreans business owners are learning Spanish—and many Latino workers are learning Korean.

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Los Angeles vs. Orange County

When they think of Los Angeles, people outside Southern California probably think of urban sprawl and freeways. In fact, although historically low rise in its built form, Los Angeles is quite densely populated. Nevertheless, when I moved to Los Angeles from central Tokyo in 1999, my first impression of life here was that Los Angeles conformed to the stereotype: vast, suburban and not very cosmopolitan.

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