Riverside Market
The commissioned graffiti-style art decorating the Riverside Market is old news. After the painting party took place in early November 2006, there was a brief blurb about “neighborhood controversy” in The Bridge neighborhood newspaper, because a few neighbors liked the art, and a few neighbors thought it looked like graffiti. Ironically, both groups of neighbors, as well as the artists who painted the building, all share a common goal: beautify this part of Minneapolis.
Anyway, the neighbors who didn’t like it called the cops to report the “crime,” but alas, there was no crime, because the paint job was commissioned by the Seward Neighborhood Group. So it’s old news…. but at this point, I am compelled to underscore the lunacy of The News, because now it’s been on TV:
http://wcco.com/topstories/local_story_004185828.html
One quote from the news story is this,
“Just weeks after the mural’s completion, illegal tags started popping up on it.”
Comically, these same “illegal tags” are the reason cited by Lori Stone of the Seward Neighborhood Group, as a reason the Group commissioned the mural project. Guess it’s not really the mural that’s magically causing these tags now, is it then?
This same concern is evident in this excellent quote from an angry neighbor, who says,
“”It’s [the art on the building is] not going to stop anything — it’s just encouraging it.”
Using that logic, it follows that buildings with flat walls are “just encouraging it.”
Anyway, after watching that story online a few times and feeling the urge to puke, I had to go to the Market again, to check out why this is so TV news-worthy all of a sudden. I want to mention that I couldn’t help but notice the complete lack of paint on anything but the building.
I drove down the alley to see the most secluded side of the Riverside Market. I was compelled to photograph the abandoned, boarded-up house right across the alley, and the long privacy fence, and thought about how maybe the Riverside Market right next to it is art, and isn’t encouraging vandalism around it.
-tinyshoes
January 25th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
my favorite part of the entire news segment is when the anchor women does the double quote with her fingers and states…”canvas”. bringing me back to days of multiple birthday shots bought by your best of friends….the lingering taste of a cement mixer…anyway.
there are two real issues here…
one, the general public’s inability to understand that graffiti can be an art form…however, in the same aspect, the same audience would not understand duchamp’s urinal as art either…so what do they know.
two, it often goes without saying that an exhibit by a graffiti artist (a mural by graffiti artists) is going to attract negative attention and that attention often comes from other graffiti artists. It happened at the walker when they exhibited the Barry Mcgee show (pieces were stolen off of the walls), it happened at a little mplsart show in which on of 27′s pieces was tagged…and now it’s happened here, the tags on the commissioned mural.
So with all that said, we need to stop feeding the issue and start helping each other…with a little respect.
“What I have in mind is that art might be good, bad or indifferent; however we have to call it art no matter what adjective we use; that thus bad art is art in the same sense as a bad feeling is still a feeling.”
(Marcel Duchamp: The Creative Process. 1957)
January 25th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Short response. More later.
Maybe it’s the word graffiti that’s the problem. Is graffiti, by definition, art or vandalism?
And, I’m skeptical that anyone who tagged “Black Sabbath” over the mural has any real beef with anyone other than their parents. I do agree that dropping the alpha dog pissing games would benefit us all. However, I don’t think it’s the Street Artists that are doing the trashing…more likely the Graffiti Artists. Hmmmm, confusing.
Trashing is part of graffiti culture that isn’t going away anytime soon.