Street Art and Its Fundamental Communication Features

Street art is an important global sociocultural phenomenon which is of interest to many researchers in the social sciences and humanities. Street art is a specific way of communication since street artists, through their topical social and political works, involve audience in a dialogue. In this regard, this article discusses street art from the perspective of its communication features. The first fundamental communication feature of street art is its location in the street and, as a consequence, its contraposition to museum and gallery art. In this respect, communication initiated by a street artist is able to cover potentially more people than a museum that addresses a limited audience. Street artists create artworks for all city residents. From this point of view, street art contributes to the democratization of contemporary art. Secondly, street art is of mandatory nature for the audience since it initially exists in the urban context and thus takes away the choice from the audience. Thirdly, street art appeals to an unready viewer, and, from this point of view, it also opposes museum art since visiting a museum is determined by a person's willingness to interact with artworks. Finally, the street artist's message is extremely ephemeral. The author of the article examines this last feature in more detail and refers to data collected from a series of expert interviews. The author explores experts' attitudes and opinions on ephemerality as one of street art's communication features. In addition, the author analyzes current methods of overcoming street art's impermanence. Among these methods are the restoration of eradicated and time-worn street artworks and the museumification of street art, that is its inclusion into the museum and gallery space. Often, museumification concerns those street art pieces that for various reasons have disappeared from city surfaces. The author explores experts' attitudes towards these instruments of street art conservation. The attitudes are highly controversial: some experts highly appreciate the methods of overcoming street art's ephemerality because they mainstream street art for the urban population, while others, on the contrary, deny the necessity of these instruments because they radically change the nature of street art. The author comes to the conclusion that currently there is no consensus in the expert community on the issue of street art's ephemerality and the necessity to conserve it.

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