Street art as “street fetish”- a new signifier of social class? The case of Brazil’s “Beverley Hills”

Abstract

This study explores street art's changing symbolic value and emplacement, the latter of which is reaching beyond the city limits and so-called 'public' space, where commissioned practices are being carried out on individuals' private homes and elite households in non-urban spaces. In this paper I focus on the process of “street fetish”, which has resulted from street art's contemporary institutionalization and shaped by complex socio-cultural, political, and economic process including de-subculturalization and artification. These microprocesses are intertwined with the convergence of authenticity and commercialization, and inseparable from practical, symbolic, organizational, discursive, and semiotic shifts taking place within the (street) art world concerning its market value, which are shaped by and simultaneously shape the field of cultural production and highly influenced by global capitalism. My investigation focuses on the work of one Brazilian street artist, RDO SAMP and his commissioned street art on a private home in the beach town resort of Jurerê International (Florianópolis, Santa Catarina), one of the most affluent towns in the country, which was designed by the world renowned, Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer and a place, where class distinctions center on enculturated symbolic and material economies.

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