I keep my iPhone slow with all the street art shots I forever shoot and store with it. Where will these photos go, this endless documentation of my surrounds? Sure, every once in awhile they'll pour out into a best-of compilation for the paper, but most of the time they're just there, staring me in the face, daring me to trap my friends into a mandatory slideshow session. "Dude, you gotta check this one out! It's... oh, um, it's like in that one alley behind that fancy hat factory?"Read more »

"The difference between art and vandalism is permission." So said Dwight Waldo, retired San Bernadino cop, at the Zero Graffiti convention earlier this month in San Francisco. The event drew law enforcement officials from multiple countries, convening them for lectures on graffiti prevention, on street art's connection to gangs and hate speech, and on ways to apprehend graffiti artists ("the Internet" figured prominently here, judging from the talks I managed to catch during the convention's public portion.) In his talk, Waldo prided himself on shutting down a graffiti-inspired legal art show because it was being organized by an illegal graffiti artist. 

But it would appear that the art community isn't satisfied with allowing those that hold the anti-graffiti wipes to be the arbiters of taste. The folks at Guerrero Gallery have branded their show opening Sat/2 with Zero Graffiti's imagery to put scrutiny on San Francisco and other cities' efforts to repress graffiti. Read more »

Kerfuffle attended the publication of my Street Seen column on the reappropriated Banksy street art that popped up at Context art fair during Art Basel week in Miami last month.

Hamptons gallerist Stephen Keszler wrote to tell me that my account of him taking two of the pieces from Palestine and affixing $400,000 price tags to the them was so boring that it made him fall asleep in the bathtub (probably just part of growing old, darling.)

But I also received an interesting communique from a man who claimed responsibility for getting the Banksy rat originally painted on Haight Street's Red Victorian hotel and cafe to Miami. He says it needs a home. Read more »

Read part one of Caitlin Donohue's Art Basel diary: South Beach here

It would be a mistake to characterize the Art-Basel-that's-not-in-South-Beach parts of Miami as containing more DIY/indie/anti-consumerist detritus than Art Deco land during the arty wheeling and dealing that occured last week (transactions worth, the Miami New Times helpfully noted, approximately the GDP of Guyana.)

Not-South-Beach, after all, included the Design District, where my camera memorably died for the last time during our Florida adventure as I was photographing an exhibit entitled "Architecture For Dogs."  Read more »

I was a little devastated when I found that the owner of Ricardo "Apex" Richey's Market and Sixth Street studio -- where he painted his canvases of street art abstractions -- had sold the building to a new owner intent on converting the raw space to tech offices. What of the Asian-run garment factories, the rickety elevators? And what, more importantly, of the rooftop that Apex had the run of, where he'd let his street art friends paint huge burners? Over the years, the space had converted into a guestbook of sorts, with murals done by Mona Caron, Neon, Chez. Read more »

It was important to Tanya Wischerath that the crowds who came to last weekend's Clarion Alley Block Party got to see the latest addition to its collection of murals. The new piece is a stirring tribute to transwomen activists, done in jewel tones on a background of night sky and stained glass. "I was told nine days before the street fair [that I got the wall], and I was adamant that I would have something finished by then," the artist said in an email. We're glad -- it's lovely.  Read more »