Symbiotic Postures Of Commercial Advertising And Street Art. And Street Art Rhetoric for Creativity Stefania Borghini, Luca Massimiliano Visconti, Laurel Anderson, and John F. Sherry, Jr. ABSTRACT: An ongoing tension between new ways of achieving novel, meaningful, and connected forms of expression is permeating the practice of advertising and igniting a lively academic debate. Novelty and social connection have long been preoccupations of art worlds. In this paper, we explore the creative tensions and synergies between countercultural and commercial communication forms of street art and advertising. Viewing each form as a species of rhetoric, we analyze a set of rhetorical practices employed by street artists that not only reflect, but might also be used to shape, commercial advertising in the near future. - Taken from 'Quest"

Advertising has been acknowledged as art (Twitchell 1996)
and christened capitalist realism (Schudson 1984). Even though
rhetoric in advertising has different purposes compared to
art (e.g., El-Murad and West 2004), the rhetorical process
in the two contexts is similar (White 1972; Zinkhan 1993).
In the same way art influences and gives meaning to our life,
advertising shapes contemporary consumer culture (e.g.,
Elliott 1997; Willis 1990). As art mirrors the shared truths,
ideals, and metaphors of a given society, advertising reflects
our popular culture. As art embodies universal fantasies,
feelings, and thoughts, advertising expresses the rational and
emotional experiences and moods of consumers. Rhetoric in
both art and advertising is strictly influenced by the social
context within which it originated (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi
1999).
A parallel art form that poses a creative challenge for the
advertising industry is the one we categorize as the global
Street Art Movement, or, more simply, street art. Street art
might be characterized as capitalist surrealism, postmodern
realism, or perhaps even as “subvertising” as it converts,
diverts, and inverts advertising proper to promote noncommercial consumption. In this paper, we analyze street art as
a species of advertising, explore the use of advertising by
street artists, and examine the implications of street art for
advertising creativity. We focus in particular on the potential contributions of the creative rhetoric employed by the
stakeholders of street art to advertising practice.
As with its commercial counterpart, street art is a product
that embodies its own advertising. Seen as a countercultural
response to commercially or statist-induced alienation, street
art is a populist aesthetic, a consumerist critique, and an
urban redevelopment project. Street art espouses a vision of
space reappropriated as place, where commercially noisy or
entirely silent streets are reclaimed by artists for their proper
“owners.” Iron shop gates become canvasses for publicly held
open-air museums. Subway trains become moving installations conveying subversive meaning to residential areas.
Such subvertising parodies, appropriates, and occasionally
capitulates to its commercial counterpart.
Street art has the visual and cognitive effect of commercial
advertising, and many of its brand dynamics, but carries messages of enjoyment, ideological critique, and activist exhortation rather than of commercial consumption. It offers both an
implicit and explicit challenge to advertisers, who ultimately
will be tasked with appropriating street art’s authentic essence
to revitalize their own commercial efficacy (Holt 2002).
Street art can be framed as advertising, promoting the
artists as well as their ideologies. Moreover, it can be framed
as an alternative template for advertising. Some street artists
are employed in the advertising industry, and some aspire to
become advertisers. Some street art is used for commercial
advertising purposes, in both legitimate and faux forms. Some
street artists rail against advertising and the consumer culture. However advertising is imbricated, street art has a multistranded relationship with its commercial counterpart.

Relying on a long-term ethnographic and netnographic
(Kozinets 2002) engagement with the global Street Art Movement, in this paper, we analyze a set of rhetorical practices
employed by street artists that not only reflects, but might also
be used to shape, commercial advertising in the near future. We
approach the craft of advertising as rhetoric (Deighton 1985;
McQuarrie and Mick 1992; Pracejus, Olsen, and O’Guinn
2006; Scott 1994b; Scott and Vargas 2007) where symbols are
used to persuade and take into account the visual aspects of
advertising (Kenney and Scott 2003; McQuarrie and Phillips
2005; Scott 1994b; Scott and Vargas 2007). We contribute to
the existing knowledge on the rhetorical process of advertising
and identify strategies that can be applied in order to enhance
creativity (El-Murad and West 2004). The rhetoric in street
art can stimulate advertising practice in two domains: idea
generation (e.g., Reid and Moriarty 1983) and social engagement (Ang, Lee, and Leong 2007).
the rhetoric oF AdVertiSing
And Street Art
rhetoric and creativity
Rhetoric is a pervasive trait of both commercial and noncommercial creativity in communication. We use the term rhetoric
to address both verbal and visual street interventions. Initially,
rhetoric was considered an exclusive domain of verbal language
(Kenney and Scott 2003). Recently, the issue of visual rhetorical practices has entered the advertising researchers’ agenda
(Bulmer and Buchanan-Oliver 2006, p. 55; Pracejus, Olsen,
and O’Guinn 2006; Scott 1994a, 1994b). Hence, an analysis
of visual rhetoric considers how images work alone and collaborate with other elements to create an argument designed
for moving a specific audience. In this light, advertising and
street art share a common interest in elaborating communication structures that inform and persuade their audiences.
Recently, there has been a demand for the development
of a general theory of advertising creativity (e.g., Reid and
Rotfeld 1976; Smith and Yang 2004; Zinkhan 1993) for
which a rhetorical approach holds much promise. Scholars
have applied contributions from psychology and adapted their
prescriptions to advertising. Blasko and Mokwa (1986, 1988)
adopt a Janusian approach, which is rooted in the logic of paradoxical thinking, apparently opposite or contradictory ideas
that can be resolved and accepted by an appropriate emotional
mental processing. Reid and Rotfeld (1976) have proposed an
associative model of creativity that shows a relevant relationship among some specific copywriting abilities and attitudes.
Novelty actually involves uncertainty of outcomes (Sternberg
and Lubart 1999) and, as a consequence, creativity involves risk
(West 1999; West and Berthon 1997; West and Ford 2001).
Empirical evidence shows that an attitude toward risk taking
is linked to higher levels of creativity as measured in terms of
advertising awards won (El-Murad and West 2003).
Interestingly, each of these elements (paradoxical thinking,
associative ability, and novelty/risk taking) is also reflected in
street art visual rhetoric. We thus demonstrate that advertising creativity can be studied as rhetoric (Deighton 1985;
McQuarrie and Mick 1992; Pracejus, Olsen, and O’Guinn
2006; Scott 1994b; Scott and Vargas 2007). Advertising is
rhetorical communication, and creativity has to serve this goal.
Our study focuses on emergent visual rhetorical practices that
can inspire advertisers.
Social use of Advertising
When investigating the intersections between street art and
advertising, the social use of advertising by its audiences needs
consideration. The current debate on existential consumption
(e.g., Elliott 1997; Firat and Venkatesh 1995; Willis 1990)
considers consumer creativity as a form of agency that is carried out within the constraints imposed by the hegemony
of the market (e.g., Goldman 1992), often expressed as the
manipulation and reinterpretation of advertising by active
consumers.
Advertising is a cultural product consumed symbolically
by consumers independently of the products being promoted
(Elliott 1997; Willis 1990). While some authors have advocated a deeper understanding of this phenomenon (e.g., Ritson
and Elliott 1999; Scott 1994b), the social use of advertising has
been an underdeveloped research topic. Some exceptions have
shown that advertising messages have a cultural meaning in
everyday life (McCracken 1988), are an incentive for word-ofmouth conversations (Sherry 1987), represent a way to reveal
an individual viewpoint to others (Mick and Buhl 1992), and
influence existing rituals (Otnes and Scott 1996). Consumers
are aware of the rhetorical conventions of advertising and are
able to interpret its rules of language in the same way they
are able to understand visual conventions applied in movies
(Pracejus, Olsen, and O’Guinn 2006).
Young people are particularly prone to engaging in the
creative use of material culture in their daily lives (O’Donohoe
1994, 1997; Ritson and Elliott 1999; Willis 1990). They
elaborate meanings, combining the irony, playfulness, and
ephemerality of advertising. They manage a vast repertoire
of codes and conventions typical of advertising messages,
revealing a combination of control and power over advertising with a certain degree of vulnerability (O’Donohoe 1997).
Moreover, through the processes of consumption, young consumers produce “grounded aesthetics” (Willis 1990, p. 21)
that make the consumption of advertising vital and pleasant,
emphasizing the search for beauty through the symbolic use
of common culture, experienced and reinterpreted as an authentic form of art.

Streets and walls provide the virtual and physical grounds
where social interpretations and manipulation of ads are performed. According to our field notes, conversations are not the
only privileged way to share interpretations and build social
meanings around advertising. Texts produced by consumers
are alternative forms of grounded aesthetics, a different form of
intertextuality where the creators are able to interlace market
ideologies and codes with resistance and rebellion. The creativity of these forms of material culture easily becomes popular
and appreciated by dwellers in public spaces.
MethodoLogy
Our study is a multisite ethnography and netnography
(Kozinets 2002; Sherry and Kozinets 2001) of street art. This
methodology is consistent with our objectives since we are focusing on the symbols and meanings of rhetoric (Scott 1994b)
and on cultural practices of creativity by street artists and
advertisers (Arnould and Thompson 2005). As a transcultural
phenomenon, street art exhibits both global commonalities
and local nuances. From 2005 through 2008, we conducted
naturalistic inquiry with global Street Art Movement stakeholders (e.g., street artists, passersby, public institutions, etc.)
in several cities in Europe (Milan, Pavia, Turin, Rome, London,
Dublin, Brussels, and Amsterdam) and the United States (San
Francisco, Phoenix, and Minneapolis). Netnographic inquiry
expanded our observations to many other sites. We immersed
ourselves in the phenomenon, attending events and monitoring news and reportage presented in the local press and mass
media.
Our multicultural, bigender research team included four
principal investigators and several assistants. Its composition
allowed us to function as both insiders and outsiders in the
inquired cultural contexts, which facilitated access during
data collection and sharpened interpretive acuity during data
analysis (Sherry 2006). Researchers operated as individuals,
dyads, and triads, and held periodic strategy and analysis
meetings as both full and partial groups. Internet connections
permitted teammates to share new data, emerging insights,
and local media coverage of street art in real time.
Because street art is illegal in the cities we studied, trust
building was a crucial component of our research. Participation
was elicited through our habitual presence, personal contacts,
key informants, snowball sampling, and word of mouth. By
establishing trust with one street artist, we often gained
acceptance with a network of street artists throughout the
country. Most interviews ranged between two and eight hours,
and informants were usually both observed and interviewed
iteratively. We conducted personal in-depth interviews with
12 key informant artists in Italy and 8 in the United States.
The ongoing exchange with these informants allowed us to
investigate the activity of the most important groups and artists in our field sites. We also interviewed 60 consumers in the
act of appreciating art or retrospectively commenting on their
experience. Netnography was appropriate given the extensive
diffusion of street art images throughout the world on street art
sites and blogs. We monitored these sites and blogs, obtaining
information on activities, thoughts, and critiques of both street
artists and consumers. Examples of these sites included www.
woostercollective.com, www.banksy.co.uk, www.graffitti.com,
www.streetsy.com, and www.thedisposablehero.com.
Data were recorded electronically and manually. Field notes
and verbatims of interviews were transcribed and photos and
videos were classified according to multiple criteria. We built
a data set of 800 pages of transcriptions, 58 pages of blogs on
the Internet, 450 photos, and 15 hours of video. Data were
analyzed and interpreted according to conventional qualitative
research standards (Arnould and Wallendorf 1994; Hirschman
1986; Kozinets 2002; Lincoln and Guba 1985; Spiggle 1994),
and involved member checking, horizontal and vertical analysis, and an ongoing comparison of details by tacking back and
forth between the particular and the general. Specifically, emergent themes and patterns were identified. These interpretations
developed over multiple readings and the interaction between
previous and emerging insights (Spiggle 1994).
While verbal data and narratives inform and sustain our
interpretation, in this paper, we rely more on visual data in
our representation to mirror the prominence given in the literature to the visual aspect of advertising (Kenney and Scott
2003; McQuarrie and Phillips 2005; Scott 1994b; Scott and
Vargas 2007). Thus, we employ the same hermeneutic strategies of close reading and deconstruction that researchers in
the consumer culture theory tradition have imported from art
and literary criticism and applied to advertising in particular
(Scott 1994a; Stern 1996) and material culture in general (Belk
and Sherry 2007) to reveal the rhetorical practices at work in
our electronic corpus of images. We provide examples of each
practice as sedimented in street art itself.
FindingS And diScuSSion
contemporary Street Art and commercial Advertising
Street art is a global phenomenon that encompasses several
physical and virtual forms of expression, including traditional
and stencil graffiti, sticker art, video projection, urban design,
tags, art intervention, poetry, and street installations. The formerly monolithic aura of the global Street Art Movement as
an illicit practice is losing its ideological primacy, giving way
to perspectives that encourage a coexistence with institutional
forces such as government and the market.
The current era of street art has become associated with
cultural trends such as fashion, music, popular art, sports, movies, video games, entertainment, and advertising. Companies such as Sony, Ikea, Saatchi, Nokia, Porsche, Opel, and Diesel
have borrowed the aesthetic of street art in order to give their
products an urban and artistic aura. Street art is thus institutionally celebrated and acquires an increasingly legitimate
cultural role.
This cultural conjoining of art, marketing, and urban discourses has progressed to the point that the typical dwellers of
public spaces find it harder to distinguish between authentic
and spontaneous street art and commercial messages. Boundaries blur into an emerging picture that fosters new creative
expressions culminating in the following main street art rhetorical practices identified as themes during our analysis.
Visual rhetoric of Street Art creativity
Despite growing interest in street art evinced by popular media
as well as by managers and academics, no previous research
has adequately investigated the nature of street art creativity
or questioned its potential effect on advertising practices.
In this paper, we explore the implications of the rhetorical
practices generated by street artists that we discerned in our
study for creating more effective, contemporary, and socially
sensitive advertising. The patterns of practices and the communication codes elaborated by street artists can be borrowed
by agencies to nurture creative processes and stimulate future
campaigns. In particular, we illustrate seven rhetorical practices found in our research: (1)aestheticization, (2) playfulness
and cheerfulness, (3) meaning manipulation, (4) replication,
(5) stylistic experimentation, (6) rediscovery, and (7)competitive collusion.
Table 1 anticipates the following discussion of rhetorical
practices, of their intertextuality with contemporary advertising, and of the possible contribution in terms of advertising
creativity. Parallels as well as distinctions emerge from opposing street art and advertising, which reciprocally benchmark,
replicate, and subvert established rules. Each rhetorical practice
can be explored and rigorously deployed in advertising and
in street art like other techniques, and steps are suggested for
creative processes (e.g., Bengtson 1982; Blasko and Mokwa
1986, 1988; Johar, Holbrook, and Stern 2001).
Aestheticization of Functional Media
Street art is rooted in rebellion against institutional reality
and its multiple forms of oppression. Contemporary street art
reverses this original logic while sharing the idea of stimulating consumer identity and agency. We found the graffiti of
urban defacement to be overcome by forms of intervention
marked by a quest for pleasant aesthetic effect. Current graffiti,
tags, stencils, stickers, murals, and other forms of street art
are designed to achieve higher levels of aesthetic performance
and response.
Our study indicated that urban design is perhaps the most
remarkable example of aestheticization. Some artists produce
creative works that give an aesthetic value to functional, everyday objects in public spaces. Garbage cans, curbstones, and
asphalt are painted and transformed into playful objects, full
of humor and cheerfulness (Figure 1).
The celebration of hedonic traits of production and consumption and the quest for aesthetic quality spur street artists
on to ever higher performance. Here we observe a parallel with
commercial advertising practice, as far as beauty and pleasant
aesthetic impact of communication is concerned. Nonetheless, street art emphasizes the opportunity arising from the
aestheticization of frequently forgotten functional media and
displays (e.g., walls, curbstones, garbage cans, stairs). Mirroring or replicating this rhetorical practice, advertising creativity
can be fostered through an innovative use of traditional media
(e.g., placards, posters, boards), or through an ongoing tryout
of new and unconventional media (e.g., sculptures, parking
lot floors). Recent studies (Dahlen 2006; Sasser, Koslow, and
Riordan 2007) have shown that creative media choices can
facilitate consumers’ perceptions of ads and thus enhance brand
attitudes. Street art practice might encourage managers to
imbue traditional commercial ads with new functions such as
decoration, curiosity, surprise, or entertainment, or to utilize
new unconventional media as suggested above.
Playfulness and Cheerfulness
Most newer street art relies on a language dominated by playful and cheerful codes in contrast to the at times melancholy
of contemporary towns. Characters, subjects, forms, shapes,
styles, and colors are often borrowed from cartoons and comics,
giving rise to the “cartoonification” of urban landscapes. Our
passersby consumers suggested that walking in the decorated
streets was similar to reading a fairy tale liberating them from
the mundane experience of living in ordinary towns.
The border between the serious and the humorous is often
transgressed, and the result is a creative mix of meanings.
Novelty, an intrinsic feature of creative products, converted
dull aspects of everyday life into meaningful or light-hearted
ones. As one of our artist informants observed:
If the world is gray, we do try to color it a little bit. . . . It is
a fantastic world through which we all try to create a world
better than our reality. . . . Personally, I feel like a clown, a
juggler who works in the streets . . . to offer a smile. I want
to enforce the idea of public space as a meeting place, which
helps people feeling better. (Pao, Milan)
The mode for this rhetoric is an apparently childlike representation of reality, which may translate any stimulus from
everyday life into humorous symbols. Even when the perspective is critical and the aim is to subvert the existing market hegemony, the codes can nonetheless be amusing (Figure 2).
The lesson for advertising is that playfulness as a rhetorical
practice can impart a fresh, positive look, which helps engage
the audience’s attention and melt its perceptual and cognitive
resistance.
As far as advertising creativity is concerned, this implies
reaching and maintaining a certain connectedness with the
audience (Ang, Lee, and Leong 2007) based on the offering
of pleasant representations of reality symbolically given as a
gift. Even though this may imply a higher degree of risk with
some clients (West 1999; West and Berthon 1997; West and
Ford 2001), it may force advertisers to explore as a habitual
creative practice the opportunity to transform ordinary and
dull entities into playful and cheerful ones. This mental exercise can diversify creative processes (Johar, Holbrook, and
Stern 2001).
Manipulation of Meanings
The third rhetorical pattern that we observed was détournement. Détournement is the practice of playfully recombining
the elements of a particular discourse in such a way as to subvert the meaning of that discourse. Street art is a multicultural
mélange, part melting pot and part mosaic. In borrowing
contents from other cultural domains (politics, marketing and
advertising, popular arts), street art appears “multivocal” and
“eclectic” (Brown 1993; Firat and Venkatesh 1995). As such,
street art also mirrors the symbolic and syncretic nature of commercial advertising (Twitchell 1996) and adopts an attitude
toward divergence that suggests ways to foster advertising
creativity (Smith and Yang 2004). We found the material and
stimuli provided by these institutions were employed in unexpected ways, in keeping with the détournement methodology in visual rhetoric proposed by Debord and Wolman (1956;
see also Harold 2007; Moore 2007). In our case, this involves
destabilizing the dominance of advertising by incorporating
elements of advertising into a new aesthetic creation.
The power of détournement originates from the double
meaning and the enrichment created by the coexistence of
old and new senses. Street artists built bridges across and
linked distant concepts. The beard can be the visible traitd’union for political leaders belonging to different moments
in time and space (Figure 3). The historical and political
cross-references were sarcastically contrasted, and the images
of these leaders were contextually elaborated in stylized and
artful ways.
In addition, icons were deployed in oppositional terms,
contrasted to their original purposes (Figure 4a). This was
often accomplished by a transfer of symbols to spaces that
were ideologically in opposition to the key message of the
artwork (Figure 4b). Using this rhetorical practice, street
artists were fond of elaborating on companies’ brand logos
and advertising images. In 2005, Banksy (www.banksy.co.uk),
for example, coined the term “brandalism” (Moore 2007) to
define those practices of street art aiming to short-circuit the one-way communication of established brands and declaim
the independence of the individual voice.
The rhetoric of manipulating divergent cultural meanings
holds three implications for advertising that would enhance
effective and creative communication targeted to urban
dwellers: (1) the contamination of codes, which are melted
or juxtaposed and transformed into completely new contents;
(2) the decontextualization of symbols, icons, and brand
logos, which find fresh associations given the new terrain of
their location; and (3) the interplay between images and their
places, which emphasizes the need for contextualized creative
communications. In so doing, communication signifiers are
first decontextualized to grant innovative meaning and later
recontextualized in consistent urban settings.
Replication of Symbols and Messages
Replication was the essence of the broadcast strategy of street
artists. In this rhetorical practice, advertising was a reference point for street artists who benchmark, replicate, and
subvert established managerial rules. Not surprisingly, most
street artists exuded a certain degree of confidence in their
grasp of managerial praxis, as they were critical consumers
themselves.
Mirroring and integrating advertising practices, the rhetoric of mass replication observed the following steps: (1) the
construction of a unique and recognizable personal/collective
creative template, (2) the transfer of some shared street art
values to this template and its replication through connected
variations, and (3) the adoption of a variety of media to masscommunicate and replicate the message.
Building distinctive and pleasant creative templates
(Goldenberg and Mazursky 2002) fueled success both within
the street artist community and across its target audiences.
Distinctiveness was variously achieved by adopting (1) specific
subjects (e.g., Pao’s penguins, Ivan’s poetry), (2)recurrent traits
(e.g., Bros’s stylized vertical eyes that animate every conceivable urban object), (3) personal logos (i.e., the previously
mentioned “tags” and other individual or collective brands),
and (4) unique space/supports (e.g., again, Pao’s predilection
for curbstones; Figure 1).
Through meaning transfer and replication, street artists
crystallized their specific creative style. Thanks to replication,
each individual or collective group benefitted beyond his/
her/its personal value. It was common to observe commercial
merchandising that resembled artists’ languages or to witness
market trading for street artists’ works. Replication typically
occurred through different levels of variation (Figure 5), which
stimulated both attention and recall as happens with creative
advertising (Stone, Besser, and Lewis 2000; Till and Baack
2005).
Finally, creative templates and messages were masscommunicated. Street artists spread their logo using various
media, from the traditional (i.e., walls and public spaces) to the
unconventional (personal Web sites working as virtual walls,
merchandising, museums, and markets). This broadcasting
system was described by our informants as a way to give creative outputs greater visibility. Several audiences thus become
acquainted with the multiple expressions of street art and may
even have used these symbols to inform their clothing style,
or to build social discourses (Willis 1990).
This rhetorical practice is already most resonant with
commercial advertisers, so a simple statement of lessons to be
reinforced from the street should suffice. Evocative symbolism
is essential not merely for establishing memorability but also
for creating community. Replication through unusual placement of messages encourages consumers to receive content not merely as an epiphany but also as a gift from the source.
The unexpected delight produced by these little discoveries
is a powerful bonding agent.
Stylistic Experimentation
Cautious in labeling themselves as artists, writers openly
stated that they do not perceive their work as “art” in the sense
that they were not entering any philosophical debate about
aesthetics. Their concern was directed toward the social and
stylistic dimensions of their work. As such, street artists did
not subscribe to dominant aesthetic rules, but acted to gain
attention from dwellers. By renouncing artistic sacralization,
the rhetoric of stylistic experimentation allowed freedom in
the search for more powerful communicational codes (e.g.,
through provocative interplay between the work and its place;
Figure 4b) that ensured exposure, attention, interpretation,
and retention (Aaker, Batra, and Myers 1992). Stylistic experimentation involves audiences by means of (1) replicability, which increases the chances of exposure and retention;
(2) desirability, which breaches the barriers of audiences’
attention; (3)accessibility, which strives for easily understood
codes interpretation; and (4) participation, which is the artists’ ability to involve passersby in discursive activities and
behavioral changes.
Replicability was attained through multiple techniques
and media: writing, stickers, stencil, and urban design. While
some of our informants specialized (e.g., Ivan’s poetry, Pao’s
urban design, Obey’s stickers), others hybridized and diversified their stylistic codes (e.g., Bros operates through graffiti,
stencils, stickers, and even canvasses).
Desirability and accessibility were accomplished through
the emulation of famous artists’ styles, and icons were used
in a strategy of manipulating familiar and accessible communication codes. Examples were countless: Warhol and
pop art represented a dominant genre, but surrealism (e.g.,
Dalì, Max Ernst, Magritte), informalism, and action painting (e.g., Pollok, Rothko, Vedova) were also appropriated
(Figure 6).
Finally, the stylistic experimentation of street artists elicits
audience’s participation in ways that may inspire advertisers in
the search of socially inspired and effective communications.
These ways include (1) intimacy, which artist communicators gained through dialogues and by dwelling in the audience’s space; (2) amusement, which softens criticism of the
dominant culture; (3) familiarity, derived from the adoption
of well-known cultural codes later translated into new fields of
meaning; and (4) bidirectionality of communication, fostered
by incomplete or challenging messages. Transfiguration as Restitution
Street art rediscovers the unseen. Street art stakeholders participated in the visionary quality of creativity, as they continuously
rediscovered forgotten spaces and dimensions of urban life. As
one walks the streets, attention is typically captured by the city
skyline, the shops, or other passersby. As a consequence, many
other places are invisible. Through playful codes and virtuous
spectacular performance, street artists celebrated unusual and
lost areas of towns. Stickers was occasionally placed at the
tallest heights of buildings or streetlamps, which required
heroic effort by the artist. Alternatively, stickers were placed
at ground level so as to evoke the infinitesimal scope of mundane life. Macrocosmos and microcosmos were encompassed
in these stickers (Figure 7). In other cases, artworks covered
neglected and vulgar pieces of urban landscapes: floors, stairs
and handrails, benches, garbage bins, curbstones, junction
boxes, or shops’ iron gates. Through street art, pedestrian
material was brought to (new) life: pieces of poetry fill the
lines of subway stair-steps, colorful frogs jump onto road signs,
and garbage bins or junction boxes become trendy displays of
urban design (Figure 8).
Rediscovery is built on the attribution of voice to previously silent meaning carriers. Instead of adding “conversation”
to crowded areas, street artists redirected such conversation
toward new horizons. Mainstream communications were
surpassed through the exploitation of previously silent corridors. Transfiguration goes beyond the mere aestheticization
of cities, since it aimed to reanimate the invisible landscape of
everyday life. Interestingly, where advertisers aim to reduce the
consumer’s sight-scope to one single purchase option, street
artists strive to extend the capability of passersby to observe
normally unobserved, invisible urban lands.
This rhetorical practice offers insights for advertising since
transfiguration highlights the relevance of the following tenets:
(1)transformation as regeneration, which celebrates a paradoxical form of communicating (i.e., things are changed in order
to become visible as they are and appreciated for their original
meanings); (2) oversizing and downsizing, which increase
the chance of gaining unexplored venues for communication
through the discovery of “out-of-touch” territories of meanings; and (3) ennobling as the capability of making silent or
marginal topics more vocal and central ones. Transfiguration as
restitution is the opposite of détournement since transformation is not directed toward subverting meanings but toward
making visible the “true” meaning of unquestioned space.
Competitive Collusion
Street art often exhibited a confrontational character. The creative factory founded by Andy Warhol in New York in 1963
represents a useful metaphor to describe the way street art replicated, perhaps subconsciously, the logic of these creative
labs, where individual work is intertwined with others’ codes,
behaviors, and narratives.
Street art’s factories are living examples of “creative socialism,” evoking communal values, democracy, denial of
hierarchies, and open sourcing of both creative outputs and
cultural competencies.
This confrontation assumed multiple forms. It involved
criticism, competition, evaluation, negation, and legal reactions as well as pride, cooperation, collusion, and creative
partnership (Figure 9a). The only recurrent trait in this
confrontational ethos was the celebration of respect beyond
occasional conflicts and groups’ parochialism nurtured by
street artists’ strong tie to the territory. An unwritten and
now largely respected rule states that no street artist has the
right to destroy the work of another (Figure 9b). It was common to observe walls with sets of interventions, each of them
visible and attributable. They comprised a kind of open-air,
open-source collection with a free ticket for all:
A writer seldom writes alone. He creates a group. . . . People
you meet and who love the things you do. . . . I give friendship
great importance. To me, the memories of these guys, even
now that I don’t see them anymore. . . . We shared moments
of fear, of pride, of happiness. . . . We were partners! (Poo,
Milan writer)
Respectful confrontation illuminates the praxis of street
art communication by highlighting: (1) the rejuvenation of
creative collective movements (i.e., the progressive dismissal
of solipsism and self-referentiality); (2) the formula of competitive collusion, as a vital combination of reciprocity and
sound individualism; and (3) the territorial rooting of contemporary communication flows (“tell local, speak global”).
The rhetorical practice of competitive collusion seems tied to
commercial advertising most vividly in social media and cocreation of advertising. Furthermore, it unpacks the transient
moods, feelings, and attitudes of postmodern citizens whose
fragmented lives are fueled by the dualism of belonging and
egotism. This awareness should sensitize advertisers to ways
of promoting products and services, as well as in competing
with other agencies.
concLuSion
Street art can be considered as an emerging template for commercial advertising and its associated rhetoric. In addition to
the visual and cognitive effect of commercial advertising, street
art also carries messages of enjoyment, ideological critique,
and activist exhortation, while unpacking and demystifying
contemporary urban consumption.
Our multisited ethnographic account describes the various
ways in which street art is a product that embodies its own advertising. We focused on seven rhetorical practices: aestheticization, playfulness and cheerfulness, meaning manipulation, replication, stylistic experimentation, rediscovery, and
competitive collusion. These practices underscore the double
nature of creativity as product and process. We define the product dimension as the “vocabulary” and the process sphere
as the “grammar” (Visconti 2008). Common (street) culture
is the ground that provides a rich vocabulary for advertising:
cheerful images, transfigured pop myths and urban objects, or
logos. Contextually, manipulation, interplay between the place
and the artwork, cartoonification, and other such practices are
pressed into service as their grammar.
Our study asserts that, with thoughtfulness in order to avoid
plagiarism or naive imitation, the rhetorical practices of street
art can be employed to improve the effectiveness, relevance,
and social sensitivity of commercial advertising. They suggest
ways to multiply the sites of advertising, catalyze innovative
and transformative messaging, refresh brands in distinctive
fashion, and engage consumers in a process of cocreation. They
also stimulate a reconnection with the active contemplation
and discussion of images forming the nucleus around which
sociality coheres and occurs. The achievement of any of these
objectives would reinvigorate commercial advertising to a
significant degree.
We have illustrated the potential implications for and contributions to commercial advertising of street art throughout
our account, and we conclude by recognizing the core elements
of street art that suggest synergies with commercial advertising
that might be realized. First, the rhetorical practice of competitive collusion represents a tangle of conflicting and often
unarticulated consumer feelings and beliefs. By combining diverse cultural competencies, novel communication and creative
practices are stimulated, and may prompt the development of
a more viable form of capitalist surrealism.
Second, our informants lament the increasingly melancholic
and paradoxical silence of contemporary urban life. Despite
an overload of communications and networks, urban spaces
are frequently transparent and hold impoverished meaning for
their dwellers. Street art contributes to a transfiguration, aestheticization, and cartoonification of these spaces, and redirects
people’s interest to different forms of consuming experience by
means of a reappropriation of apparently ordinary and takenfor-granted artifacts.
Third, an appreciation of the rhetorical practices of street
art highlights the quest for expressions of communicational
democracy. Commercial advertising creativity can infuse the
drive for familiar communication codes (borrowed from pop
art, streets, consumer communities, etc.), cocreation, and
a peer-to-peer approach (avoidance of top-down visions) in
meaning transfer.
Finally, our data suggest that advertisers must stretch the
boundaries of aesthetics. From more traditional attention devoted to the content of communication, street art has extended
its creative realm to the container through which the message
is conveyed. Relying on aestheticization and playfulness, street
artists are transforming materiel into expressive artifacts. The
synergy between container and contained builds new meanings
for target audiences.
The current interplay of commercial advertising and street
art is fascinating. Street artists’ creativity is steadily stimulated
by advertising provocations and proposals. At the same time,
street art demonstrates an increasing marketability, which even
reinforces its links to the advertising world. The commodification of street art is a vital topic for future investigation.
In an era when people’s symbolic immersion borders on the
overwhelming, when creative industries become so interpenetrating that hybrids proliferate more quickly than scholars’
ability to track them, and when the competitive threats to
advertising of all kinds grow so pervasive, it is useful for
researchers to focus on a discrete arena that hosts a particular
form of creative symbiosis. Our choice of street art as a vehicle for exploring this symbiosis suggests that, no matter the ideological differences in surface structure, the resonant similarities in deep structure between distinctive creative enterprises
encourages a symbiotic relationship to flourish as commented
upon by one artist informant:
In effect, we have something in common with advertising . . . a
deep link. Not only the format: large posters and billboards . . .
also the place: on walls, like advertising. The invasive effect
is the same, the attack is the same. We don’t say, “we’re here,
if you want, read us”; we say, “come over here and read us.”
Our message is that advertising is a form of art, say, poetry,
because it’s a means of linguistic-visual communication,
which through linear, intuitive, emotional paths transmits
messages that go beyond the literal meaning. Like a poem,
when it tells you something, it’s telling you something else
with regard to the literal meaning, the reverse. . . . So does
advertising: it presents ideals, values and, especially of late,
emotions. We do the same thing but . . . the nice thing is that
we can try . . . really try everything. (Matteo, Eveline group
of poetic assault, Milan)