A Two Way Street

When it comes to art, I don't see how anyone could even have rules. A set of rules never in life have been made in a form of art. In fact, I think that Art was discovered probably by accident. It's how we as people perceive art. Street art could probably be known as vandalism. I think it's art. It isn't following the rules so that's why I see it as art. It's a different form of art that most artists prefer for it to be on a wall that they don't have to pay in order for it to be on there.

In 1989 a lanky 19-year-old working at a Rhode Island skate shop created a mug shot–style sticker of a seven-foot-tall, 500-pound French wrestler named Andre the Giant. As far as stickers go, it was pretty crude. A hand-stenciled image of his face was accompanied by the inscrutable phrase “Andre the Giant Has a Posse.” The artist ran off 100 copies of the image and got to work pasting it all over Providence. Once he had the city covered, he moved on to Boston, New York, and the rest of the eastern seaboard. “Andre” materialized everywhere—stop signs, pay phones, airport bathrooms. A startled patron at an Athens, Georgia, diner found the wrestler’s sleepy visage staring back at him from the inside lid of a coffee creamer.

“I’ve generally found that there has been a bias against artists who didn’t play by the established rules, who weren’t the product of influential curators and writers,” says Jeffrey Deitch, the Manhattan dealer who represents Swoon, Espo, Os Gemeos, and McGee, as well as the estate of ’80s graffitist Keith Haring. But, he notes, this attitude has begun to change. “Now there’s a number of younger curators who followed these artists when they were working on the streets and who are now in positions to do something,” says Deitch. “They don’t make a differentiation that Swoon chose to develop her work on the street or that she’s somehow not as worthy of serious attention as an artist who went to the Whitney Independent Study Program.”

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