Today was all about Czech graffiti and street art. Spent a lot of the day thinking about Point's recent work and the work of Epos 257, and the general Banksy-ish world of street art as gentrification wallpaper/meta-marketing/institutionalized institutional critique and all the stuff that seems like some weird Tom Frank 2.0 chit chat. I do like Banksy's argument that aesthetics should have no play in whether a piece or a scribble are illegal - they should just be the same damn thing. But the reality is one gets buffed and the other gets galleries, and maybe some part of Banksy's ideology is the reason he's the one in. But hell, his work is good, and so is Point's, and Point doesn't just do the works but is an advocate, organizer, and writer for the scene and uses his work as a platform to talk about publics, art, and space in general. It's like a full bore public intellectual, though I can't say autodidact because he, like lot of Czech street artists, comes from art school.

I really love Epos's work - it forms a continuous line from conceptual art, social sculpture, and a kind of performance-of-the-art-criminal with so much humor, creativity, and inexhausible innovation. (He just had a book out in January, I have to get it). However much this work gets documented, gallerized, hailed - commoditized, historicized, frozen - it also exists as this quotidian engagement that  makes life on the streets of Prague so much more a pleasure that it already is. The streets here are full of riddles and puzzles and connections, shocks and bizarre colors, potentially not accidental scenarios that engage, startle, and sometimes even disturb. I like to think of these pieces as gifts to the pedestrian, my chance to have an exchange with the city, the artist, the moment. It is, to me, what art should do.

I know I should have a more sophisticated engagement with street art, having been in a band with a dude who worked at Alleged and having haunted Deitch Projects through the 2000s. But I do think there's something qualitatively different about the work I see here - more cut outs, more 3D, less stencil work, stickering, and wheatpasting (generally more figurtative over lettering) - and something shocking to me about it in the daily space of a city with such a deep historical building fabric.

Maybe it's because graffiti only came to being in the '90s here, or because the hip hop culture here is so different than the one in the U.S., or because art schools are thriving like mad with the newest two generations, or because of the proximity of Berlin, or because of the way cops do or don't crack down, or because of the way city and state buildings understand their surfaces as "public," or because of public walls, or because of private walls. I don't know. But I'm thinking about it.