"As street art has gone mainstream, its popularity has birthed an
industry that capitalizes on its pop culture status. Demographically
targeted goods from custom graffiti paints to clothes have seen an
enormous upswing in the past decade. Far from its modest origins as an
illegal art form, street art more often finds itself sponsored by
corporations looking to broaden their niche appeal and to cash in on the
massively swollen “subculture” that it has given birth to. The
culmination of this is the interaction between the fashion industry and
the “hot” street artists willing to basically license their brand in
order to cash in.
...
Streets artists working in this medium need to take a deeper look at the
content of their creations. Given some introspection and forethought,
one comes to see that the use of fashion imagery is like a cancer
spreading inside of a once independent subculture. Rotting away the core
of its value by co-opting its aesthetic techniques in order to market
products via the continual appropriation of youth culture that has so
long fed the fashion industry. The truth is that these corporations have
stolen and co-opted street art and are selling it back to young artists
at a retail markup."
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