Urban art or street art concerns everything that is expressed in the streets of our city, generally in an illegal way and that is presented as spontaneous or non-institutional artistic interventions. Urban art integrates various techniques to express political, social, religious or any other kind of messages. The most common techniques that we can recognize in the streets are graffiti, stencil, booms, posters, mosaic murals, etc.
Street art seeks to be carried out in public places that are transited to attract people’s attention. Its main objective is to transmit a message or criticism. With this purpose, striking and creative techniques are used as a method of fighting to be heard or seen, and to capture the attention of the public and people who walk the streets.
Since the street art, through a heterogeneous group of artists, began to create new techniques and forms (stencil, murals, interventions and installations, posters, etc.) of artistic expressions in the streets, so now graffiti begins to be a branch of urban art, like these new street art expressions.
For a long time there has been a problem and discussion about street art: Art or vandalism? As a result of this, many positions have emerged and at the same time many doubts, which encourages us to go deeper into the issue and at the same time to be able to position ourselves in some way in front of the subject.
Many times we have asked ourselves who are the characters that make these drawings, paintings or stripes on the walls of the city or at what times they do them. We realize that in most cases these acts are carried out secretly, mainly because they are punishable by law and badly seen by the common people. It is important to differentiate between the different types of “street art” that can be seen on the streets.
Graffiti is mostly the letters that make up the author’s artistic name, painted in an expressive way, with different styles and colors in large sizes; tags, which in our opinion are the most questionable, are the signature with the author’s “artistic” name and can be seen in most parts (posts, grids, walls, buses, etc.); finally, stencils, used by a larger number of people, are images that can be repeated several times and generally contain ironic messages to convey a protest, idea or demonstration in front of a subject.
There are many abandoned places that are taken advantage of by these street artists since they have no other places to express their art or manifestations. The problem arises when spaces such as house walls or public places are used without their respective permits, generating something that for some is art and for others, vandalism.
Lately, the situation has been changing, different municipalities and institutions have provided spaces for these people to develop their art legally, quietly and with some social support. Every year events are held in which diverse expressions such as skateboarding, break-dancing, hip-hop music and graffiti are mixed in great places.
A place open to the public where street artists are given this space to show their work in a legal way and in interaction with the public. But this does not solve in a global way the disjunctive that we are raising.