Street Art in the Context of the Historical Avant-garde

Abstract

Last decade is characterized by the rapid street art institualisation. Today street-art works are exhibited in the galleries, numerous street art exhibitions as well as festivals are arranged and even museums devoted to street art are appeared although the latter sounds like oxymoron. This marginal sort of activity is turned to a number of mixed but socially approved art practices (for example, public art, garden guerilla and so on). Nevertheless, street art is a subject of many discussions the topics of which are quite wide. They include its definitions and composition, its status clarification in the modern culture. There has been no common opinion about the essence of street art up to now if it is a social practice (it is quite often deviant) or it is still an art? In any case, philosophers and sociologists have been interested in street art more than art historians. One of the discussed problems regarding which the researchers did not manage to come to the common opinion is a problem of the interrelation of street art and avant-garde. At first sight, the similarity of these phenomena of the culture is obvious. Street art dynamics, its youth, energy and sincerity, explicit and inexplicit protest potential, active use in the creative process by means of different technologies cause some associations concerning avant-garde art in many authors. But how rightful is the imagination regarding street art as about “elemental” or “non system” avant-garde of present days [9]. And in what circumstances can street art be pretended to take a vacant place of avant-garde in the modern art? The comparative analysis of the first historical avant-garde and street art allows to clarify street art position in the space of the modern art.