From their Facebook Page:
Wooster Collective wants to know: If you were in charge of curating the first major museum dedicated to graffiti art, who would you include in the permanent collection?
Some interesting comments ensued, as you might imagine. My favorite was from Xabi Noface Nobook (ha, clever name, too!), who said “graffiti art shouldn’t be permanent“.
I’d have to agree in many respects. But the question still remains: As a hugely popular art-form of our generation, with works subject to destruction almost immediately after their creation, what is there to preserve this piece of our cultural heritage? I do think that a reasonable effort should be made to catalog these works of art, but we’re talking about something so wide-spread, so fast-changing and evolutionary, how is it even possible to catalog such a thing? A piece of street art may be one thing one day, and a completely different thing on another after someone else saw it and evolved it. This is something that the typical museum curating process is not accustomed to, and will never be. Also, there remains the issue that most of these works of art cannot be removed in the first place. They are already owned by someone else by their very nature.
So yes, we have the internet, and great people, groups and organizations dedicated to finding, displaying, and archiving photographs of such artwork, but if we think about that in the perspective of 50-100 years from now, it brings up another interesting series of questions:
Would seeing a photograph reproduction of a Jacques-Louis David painting suffice? What about a Da Vinci? There’s probably plenty of people in the world that have seen neither, but it doesn’t make the question any less important. Who judges works of art in a world where they can be destroyed at a moment’s notice if they are valuable as a cultural artifacts? Who does the judging to destroy them, in the case of city and property maintainance? And what is important about having the physical piece in the first place? Graffiti has always been about the message, not the medium, but the medium on a larger scale is often a huge part of the content and the message of graffiti, and so the two can be, and sometimes are, inextricably linked. All of this was never true for previous eras in art history.
It’s possible it was a simple question that deserved no further thought, but it’s also a thought that deserves much more questioning, especially as this art form becomes more forefront and central to our culture and establishes itself as the art form of our era.