Suffering slings and arrows, and buckets of paint

GAWKER hosts Elizabeth Currid's refreshingly lucid musings on the international urban art scene. She illuminates the tension between underground heroes who have found mainstream success—Bansky, Swoon, Ryan McGinley—and their young, art-schooled detractors, a disgruntled and increasingly vocal minority. Her examples include New York's pet villain, "the splasher", and an artist named Laura who executed an amusing parody of Damien Hirst's "For the Love of God".

"A stroll through the art districts of New York or Los Angeles or London gives you a sense of the buzz surrounding the contemporary street art movement," Ms Currid writes, "something unseen since the days of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat."

But the commercial success of those artists is controversial, even today. Juan Puntes, a director at New York's nonprofit White Box gallery, put it this way to an Economist
interviewer in July: "The work of Basquiat bores the hell out of me. This guy was the typical thing--was from New York, made friends with Andy Warhol, and everybody loved him. They killed him. They gave him too much money, too much coke. They fucked him too much. And then he was gone. Right? Let's cry. And then let's sell the work, and everybody makes millions."

Moreover  Fine art  

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