Negotiating Urban Aesthetic Order: Processes of Space Valorisation through Graffiti and Street Art

In the framework of contemporary “creative” urban strategies, at the same time as various official projects exploit street artists for urban regeneration purposes, graffiti writers are still prosecuted for their actions on walls, on trains, in the streets. Thus, the value attributed to these practices makes them visible in opposing yet simultaneous directions. Following Brighenti (2016a), who relies on a Deleuzian concept (1968/1975), I refer to this tension as divergent synthesis. I consider it relevant to pay attention to these tendencies in the discursive repertoires, representations, negotiations and resistances implied when dealing with graffiti and street art to inquire about the role they have in changing, visibilizing and shaping urban space aesthetics, and the social relations that take place there.

I plan to focus on the discourses, narratives and negotiations that represent the underlying linguistic systems of measure of the complex dynamics of value attribution, keeping in mind that measures are never neutral: through any measurement act, ascribing meanings, both epistemic models and power tools can be identified (Brighenti, 2016b). Moreover, I consider valorization processes as inherently unstable and multifaceted, capable of condensing scattered discursive repertoires and representations that affect the perception of the aesthetic (dis)order of the cities (Brighenti, 2018; Vaslin, 2021). For this purpose, I consider aesthetic capitalism (Böhme, 2003, 2010, 2017; Murphy & de la Fuente, 2014) a particularly helpful theoretical attempt to explain the current manifestation of neoliberalism, since it allows us to observe how value is extracted from aesthetics.