Street Art and Dialogue: A Public Place Is Born

Street art can help us understand public goods. In Street Art, Sweet Art? Reclaiming the "Public" in Public Place (forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research) Luca Visconti and Stefania Borghini, with co-authors John Sherry (Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame) and Laurel Anderson (Carey School of Business, Arizona State University) explore the way in which active consumers negotiate meanings about the consumption of a particular public good - public space - transforming it into a place, i.e. consumed space.

In a multi-sited, multi-year and multi-national investigation of public place consumption via street art, the four consumer researchers undertook extensive ethnographic work in 18 towns in six nations, interviewed 20 street artists and 60 consumers, analyzed websites and publications, building a dataset which integrates 640 pages of transcriptions, 58 pages of blogs on the internet, 450 photos and 15 hours of videos.

In their supra-economic definition, a public good is a good which a collectivity of citizens attributes itself a shared ownership over, while street art is a form of active place marking, which "stimulates dwellers to establish a critical relationship with city place reclaimed from space". Tagging (the repetition of nicknames or words of rebellion on public walls), writing (in stylized characters as an aesthetic exercise related to the need of self-affirmation within a community of peers), sticking (pasting drawings and symbols in public spaces), stencil (replicating the same form or symbol in multiple places), poetic assault (writing poetry on dull public spaces) and urban design (an aesthetic practice applied in favor of the beautification of public architecture) are the forms of street art considered by Visconti and his colleagues.

The interpretive model developed in the paper identifies two ways of appraising public space: individualistic, that is subscription to the private appropriation of public space, and collectivistic, that is acknowledgement to the sharing of public space in the common interest. In the first case artists and dwellers act as separate agents who claim personal entitlement to public space or dispose of these spaces according to market rules; in the second one they aim to defend the collective ownership of public space while striving for its restitution to meaningful consumption.

The intersection of artists' and dwellers' positions discloses four ideologies. We have private appropriation of public space when dwellers consider walls as private property and artists want to use them for personal gain; dwellers' resistance to the alienation of public space when dwellers live the spaces as collective property and artists as a personal canvas; artists' claim for street democracy if dwellers resist the collectivization of the spaces and artists favor it; joint striving for common place when dwellers and artists share the vision of space as collective property.

The researchers notice that whenever at least one of the parties holds an individualistic appraisal of public space the confrontation becomes conflictual (dialectical), while the assumption of collectivistic positions by both dwellers and artists stimulates fruitful dialogues, leading to a dialogical recreation of public places.

"We demonstrate that positive and negative conversations between artists and dwellers help overcome the logic of self-interest and advance forms of cooperation and belonging, particularly in contexts where market competitiveness and lack of trust exist, as happens in contemporary towns", the authors write, and moreover, "we believe our interpretive model can be adapted to understand the consumption of other public goods beyond space/place", even if each public good maintains idiosyncratic features asking for a critical adaptation of the model".