Art is by no means limited to the museum. In fact, the entire world can be the canvas of an artist. Under that motto, we declare the world our canvas, the guys from Street Art Utopia started an amazing website showing how much creativity we can find on the streets of our cities. The street is in fact one of the best places to display art: isn’t it a pity that Tutanchamun’s death mask, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Warhol’s portraits are all solidly locked away in buildings that aren’t always accessible for free?
Street art has definitely evolved to become more than simple graffiti or tags on walls and metros. Street Art Utopia, as well as similar websites as Unurth and Streetsy offer us testimony of the very own vision of society that street artists have. As the image below by the famous artist Banksy shows, Street Art has a long history, but a temporary nature: it is always doomed to lose the battle with the municiple policies of cleanliness.
However, not all the images on Street Art convey social criticism. Often, they regard small and funny images, using particular features of the street. For instance, the work below from the French artist Oakoak creatively uses a crack in a wall to make a caravan of camels pass. Other artists bring Lego bricks or knitted works to town.
But the value of this type of art can be even bigger than plain fun: it can even bring individuals closer in places where people seem irreconcilable. The French artist JR – winner of the 2011 TED Prize – used it in the one of the most desperate conflict zones of the world: Palestine. On both sides of the Israeli wall, he put portraits of Israeli and Palestinians. Surprisingly often, one can’t understand which photo is taken at what side of the wall.
It is truly wonderful that artists use the public space they found to turn it into a more beautiful and even a better place. And since all street art is temporary, the work that Street Art Utopia and its colleagues are doing has great value. Without the effort of these websites and their visitors, the public of all these important and entertaining images would be rather small. And if you want, Street Art Utopia even serves you a daily bite of street art through a highly recommendable Facebook page (over 140,000 likes), where every day a new image is posted. As such, they make part of a laudable community, spreading art under the people in a 21st century kind of way. No museum required.
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