Globe's Love/Hate Relationship with Street Art

We can just imagine the scene. Globe reporter tries to get hip with Street Art. Stalks Myspace, meets up with, and interviews Pixnit about her experience, technique, and dreams. Fluff piece is written up and sits on the editors' desk for about a month until a nice, slow news day hits. Say January 3? The article runs. Readers write in (and leave comments), angry with the soft handed and accepting tone of the original article. A few of those complaints are run with a picture in the January 5th edition. The Globe looks for a way to react. They put their local crime beat reporters to the task of getting an article in print about how graffiti is bad. Half written already, the article just waited for the Boston Police to deliver the goods – January 7 the blotter already was marked by the arrest of a pair in Mission Hill for dropping the Tel tag on buildings overnight.

Of course we're talking about two different things that are treated the same by the law: street art and graffiti. Street art is the wing of graf that tends to deal in stencils and stickers; more traditional graf is tag-bombing and aerosol pieces. Pixnit is a stencil street art artist – Tel is a freehand tagger. For property owners the graffiti which lands on their building, street art or not, will get them pretty upset. But unlike traditional tagging, street art will often turn a head of a passerby who finds the stencil or paste-up attractive. Street art, tagging, graffiti – whatever you want to call it – Bostonist is pretty sure that Lifer! is still doing a pretty good job of leaving a mark on the city. Even though there is apparently some competition.

Sushiesque posts up a photo (above) of the latest addition to the "crosswalk" park at Porter Square (and wonders where MegaMan went in Central). For more street art head to Streetsy.com where Gothamist co-founder Jake Dobkin curates an online street art collection of photographs..