#Instafame: aesthetics, audiences, data

Abstract

This chapter examines the ways in which graffiti and street art are increasingly produced as digital objects, shaped by the architecture of digital platforms and the aggregated responses of audiences, transmuted into data. This process is neatly captured by the title of a recent exhibition at the Steinberg Museum of Art in New York.1 The ‘From Concrete to Data’ exhibition featured a mix of old school graffiti writers and documenters, street artists and contemporary artists working across all media, including many examples of screen-based media influenced by the aesthetics and practices of graffiti. Taken as a whole, this kind of work charts the transformation of graffiti from a form attached to the industrial landscape to one at home in the post-industrial city, one characterized not just by new materials and new economies – renovated buildings and gentrified neighbourhoods – but one in which graffiti and street art has become a set of mobile aesthetic features that, like the older industries, shift to new physical materials and then begin to dematerialize.

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