Wall Snatcheroo

View this photo If “all art is mediated by values arising from its culture and from its immediate context" ( Dipeveen, 9), then what can I make of street art, pulled off the street and placed in a gutted Staples store in the heart of Georgetown?  I’m thrilled to see graffiti appreciated as an art form, but while I enjoyed the Wall Snatchers exhibit, I found myself disappointed, feeling like some of the pieces were incomplete or rushed.  Despite a few exceptions (Faile’s mural and everything Bask)  I felt unsatisfied, because the contex of the graffiti had been so disoriented.  I think this has a lot to do with graffiti being stripped of its usual street mystique, as graffiti tends to be strategically placed on interesting buildings or walls allowing previous layers of advertisements or the texture of a brick wall to interact with the tag or the mural.  By extracting these works from their usual environment they seemed shivering, naked. The space in which these works were presented also distorted their context.  By housing them temporarily in a gutted out Staples, I couldn’t help but notice a bit of residual corporate goo trickling into that which fight so hard to oppose any such institutional or corporate involvement.  Though the Washington Project for the Arts & Corcoran had good intentions for funding such a project, it inadvertently stripped the pieces of their allure, allowing the space in which the work was celebrated to unintentionally deride it.