Creating or Defacing? Sticker Art

We’ve all walked past newspaper boxes covered in stickers for years. These days, the anti-graffiti, clean-up-the-neighborhood campaigners consider them defaced property and usually remove them immediately. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it is said. In the case of sticker art, that is not just a saying, it sums up a core dilemma of street art. And, in certain neighborhoods you can hardly talk about street beautification without touching on gentrification.

The box above is on a sidewalk in the RiNo district of Denver near a club called Larimer Lounge. Something I love about dive bar music venues is the stickers and scrawl covering the walls. The Lounge’s decor is practically devoted to them – they’re on the walls in the bar, up a flight of stairs leading to the bathrooms, on the bathroom doors and of course, in the stalls. The newspaper box could easily be mistaken for something that was inside for a few years then got put outside.

The colors of the stickers are vibrant and come together with the painted graffiti to create an exciting piece of art made by many different people adding and subtracting over time. The self-expression that each person brings to the piece could be as random as just wanting to slap a sticker on something or as thought out as layering colors and messages.

For example, this flyer on the left is part of the collection on one side of the red box. This is definitely not something stuck on just to get it off the street or out of someone’s hands. The way the pink sign and its message pop against the red background and black-and-white items around it signals its intentional artistic statement.

The image on the right is an image by the Montreal-based street artist Miss Me. The nude woman in the mask is a recurring image in her works and her name is well-known in the world of street art. There’s every chance she put it there herself during a visit to Denver.

I admit that at some angles the news box just looks dirty and the images on it have been damaged in less than artistic ways. But, those same tears and scratches give a texture much like elements of a multimedia piece. The tagging that sits underneath and all around adds a handmade element to complement the printed materials.

The image on the right is by the Denver artist Reed Weily. He makes large, gorgeous fine art sticker collage pieces that have the same idea. The first time I saw his work in person I stood for about 20 minutes with my mouth actually hanging open examining just one piece. Had the piece been out on the street with other sticker art it may have been removed or damaged out of disregard. But, this piece was in a gallery and had a price tag of around $25,000.

So, back to gentrification. Street art has generally been stigmatized as only gang tagging and defacement of private property. But, as in the case of Weily’s work if you can buy it, it’s art. If it’s commissioned, it’s art. If it’s really expensive it’s really good art. If a famous collector previously owned it, it’s extra good and extra expensive.

Likewise, if it happens on the street organically and anonymously, and is impossible to purchase and take home it’s not “real art.” Luckily for the art world and the general non-art -loving public that perception is changing.