… a new cause in town.
Themes in street art, as in any other cultural milieu, come and go. A new radicalized idea will pop up, enjoy a sudden popularity and then slowly suffer the big fade. Its moment in the sun is not necessarily a measure of its importance or a lack of commitment to its intention; it is probably just our inability to stand tough and focused long enough before the next, bigger and even more annoying issue arises.
Spotting the next social bug-a-boo is an uplifting experience. One just never knows what to expect, but happily one thing that does happen is that street art often reveals an incredible breadth of human ingenuity for detecting insults hurled at us and our predisposition to attempt to reddress them. Optimistically, it points to our ever-developing social conscience and just how far down that road we have moved as a socially responsible group.
An anticipated bugaboo has arisen. Two of the latest paste-ups on the street are concerned with “miscegenation”. For those of us in the dark . . . the general definition is “mixture of races; especially : marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race”.
To many urban dwellers this hardly seems to be a likely issue today, but lets remember that it was only in 1968 that the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that state laws prohibiting miscegenation were unconstitutional.
Life would definitely be a lesser experience and the world a poorer place to inhabit without all of us in it together – so these two new paste-ups are welcome. It is good to know that someone out there is watching.
In the meantime, here is another addition to my “Word on the Street” collection of images and a report on how artists do their usual . . . lay down some paint.
Widereye.net 