The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As graffiti gets hip, landlords try to cash in
Critics fear changing neighborhoods via commercialization.
Julian Phethean’s first canvas in London was a shed in his backyard where he covered the walls with bold lettering in spray paint. When he moved his art to the city’s streets in the 1980s, it was largely unwelcome — and he was even arrested a few times.
“We had nowhere to practice,” he said. “It was just seen as vandalism.”
These days, the canvases come to Phethean, better known as muralist Mr Cenz. Recent facades, which he shares with his sizable following, have included an abstract mural on a Tesla showroom and a portrait of Biggie Smalls, sponsored by Pepsi Max.
“I never would have envisioned that I’d be able to do it for a living,” he said.
Landlords wanting to attract young professionals once scrubbed off the rebellious scrawls. That was before graffiti moved from countercultural to mainstream. Now building owners are willing to pay for it.
From Berlin to London to Miami, the wider acceptance of graffiti has attracted developers looking to expand into trendy areas, companies wanting to relocate to hipper neighborhoods and brands seeking creative ways to advertise their products.
But that attention to once overlooked neighborhoods has pushed up rents, leaving artists, fans and local officials with a quandary: What happens
after the street art that brought character becomes commodified?
Contemporary graffiti traces back to the anti-establishment expression of the 1960s and 1970s, when anyone with a can of spray paint could tag the sidewalks of Philadelphia and the subway cars of New York. In Soviet-era Berlin, protesters splattered the west side of the wall while the east side remained blank — until it fell in 1989, opening vast new canvases overnight.
The gallery world took note, but it was social media and the fame of artists like Banksy, Vhils and Lady Pink that propelled it to a wider audience. What followed was a movement that experts say has been reproduced from Australia to Argentina, as street art added to a neighborhood’s cultural cachet.
Take Shoreditch in east London as an example: Decades ago, developers deemed it a
run-down industrial area. Still, it was a sanctuary for artists who made use of cheap rents to build a creative enclave.
“What artists bring is a sense of buzz: newness, creativity, trends,” said Rosie Haslem, managing director of Streetsense UK, a consulting agency. “Hipsters attract more hipsters who have more money and are able to start paying higher prices.”
That buzz also drew developers and companies that sought to leverage the popularity of Shoreditch. A former tea-packing plant now hosts a branch of the private members’ club Soho House. Down the road is Amazon’s largest corporate office in the region.
Spray painters still add political messages to the mosaic of artwork in east London. But they are nestled between more commercial interests: handpainted campaigns sponsored by L’Oréal, Sky and Adidas, and street tours that treat the art as a tourist attraction.
Many campaigns are from agencies that act as middlemen between artists and the businesses interested in their work.
“We were splashing around in the water and a wave came,” said Lee Bofkin, a co-founder of Global Street Art, a London advertising agency. In the decade since its inception, it has grown to more than 30 employees, and Adidas, Moncler and Valentino
have leased its walls.
Developers are responsible for a chunk of the 300 or so murals splattering Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood. The windowless walls of the former garment district had long appealed to graffiti artists, but one developer helped drive the 2009 opening of the Wynwood Walls, an open-air gallery visited by 3 million people each year.
“We had to find a carrot to try to bring investment into the area,” said Manny Gonzalez,
the executive director of the Wynwood Business Improvement District. Street art, he said, was the lure. “We knew that we needed to keep the art.”
Five years ago, there were no office buildings in Wynwood. Now, tenants include Spotify, accounting firm PwC and the venture capitalist Founders Fund. Sony Music has leased office space there. And tech companies from San Francisco and New York are coming, Gonzalez said.