The rise of graffiti and social media: Is the writing on the wall for tradition?

Bristol has hit the headlines today with news the City Council is asking Bristolians to vote on whether pieces of graffiti should be kept as art or cleaned up as vandalism. And within that debate we see a strong analogy with social media.

Bristol residents are probably more open than most to the graffiti debate. Most of us love Banksy – the coffee shops and hotels around the City Museum on Park Street are particularly enthusiastic.

From Stokes Croft to Easton via Kingsdown, graffiti is part of the city’s identity and Banksy’s meteoric rise to art world A-lister does convey a cool upon us all - something Bristol City Council is clearly tapping in to by taking this story to the press.

But is the Council in danger of sanitising the debate by wading in and making it all so….legitimate? Has the City Museum already done so by hosting this summer’s exhibition?

Similarly, LEWIS Bristol is hosting a debate tomorrow evening around social media, raising the question whether businesses can ever really harness social media to its best effect? Or will it just sanitise channels and render them no longer of use or interest?

The very nature of social media is that it is both immediate and ubiquitous. It’s spray painting on the walls. It’s often in our social lives whether we like it or not, and it affronts, confronts or inspires, depending on your view point. You choose to walk down Twitter Boulevard and you never know quite what you’re going to be exposed to. The same could perhaps be said of Stokes Croft here in Bristol.

Graffiti challenges our preconceptions of traditional art, and social media challenges our ideas about ‘traditional’ media channels. Both are the subjects of lively debate in Bristol and around the world at the moment.

What do you think? Have we got the right to decide what graffiti stays and what goes? And by making it ‘official’ graffiti, won’t it lose much of its power? And does social media too need to maintain at least a pretence of disruption?

In a frankly smug fusion of my analogy, we’re going to discuss this over Twitter now (#bristolstreetart), and I’ll report back on how the conversation goes at our Digital Dinner tomorrow evening.

In the meantime, the LEWIS Bristol team is about to take some spray cans to the pristine white walls of our lovely office. If it’s good enough for Banksy…