One thing I don’t believe we have covered yet on this site is the sticker. And, after receiving a pack of fantastic stickers yesterday, I asked myself a question: can the sticker be seen as real street art?

I guess the answer to this would be similar to the answer of how long is a piece of string? It also brings us back to the question of what is street art? This is a crucial question with no definite answer.

If you want to label slaps as street art, then you must recognise how different they are from your usual street art mediums. For example, the main idea which is holding me back from giving stickers there full street art symbol is, slaps are made prior to going out unlike throwups. Now, you may here say that ’stencil artists produce there own stencils before going out’ - and you’d be right, but an incredible amount of thought goes into making the stencils (assuming they aren’t using photoshop :P).

On the other hand, sticker artists do often produce there own stickers to an incredible standard with a whole host of materials: spray cans, markers, stencils etc. They often drip with imagination, style and originality.

I think this then takes us to another question: when do stickers move away from art and become propaganda?

Slaps can be put up very quickly similar to a tag but for me a tag isn’t street art. And with the ability to put this ‘art’ up in a few seconds and hundreds in a hour, does the art just become an advert for the artists?

I would define the stickers produced for Concrete Canvas as propaganda  - its whole purpose is to advertise as you’d expect mass produced stickers to be. However, after receiving a very generous pack from AURORA yesterday this has made me change my mind slightly. AURORA’s stickers are mass produced but they are beautiful, they have been designed by a wide variety of artists and I look at AURORA’s stickers thinking they are art.

So, can stickers be considered as real street art? YES. They sure can!

Tags: Stickers

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 10:38 am and is filed under Stickers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.