Paris With a Parisian

A great Summer of Street Art in Paris!

Paris can be seen as a very conservative city, even a museum city. Yet its street art scene is one of the most fascinating in the world… here is an example:

The beauty with street art is that it’s temporary. So one can walk the same street in two different seasons, and see very different things. As a tour guide, I love to take people in these incredible walks, because they do represent a very pleasant challenge to me: I never know what I will find ahead of time. Sometimes a piece I love is gone, erased forever by the evil toll-free phone number of the Town Hall. Sometimes a whole street has been invaded by a street artist, who organized under the moonlight a clandestine exhibition of his work. Sometimes pieces are ruined by other taggers, sometimes, rarely, a mural makes it for years.

Slowly, but surely, fame is more and more putting the spotlight on that scene, years after Keith Haring’s and Jean-Michel Basquiat/SAMO’s death. While the academic art of our era, the art installations and the official « round-about » commissions do not getmuch interest from the public anymore, a growing vibration seems to take on Street Art. From Banksy and the movie « Exit through the giftshop » to the blockbuster exhibitions of Graffs worlwide, Street Art is finally getting the recognition it deserves, and Paris has turned out to be a leading city in that field. Muralists like Marko93, dAcRuZ or Djalouz turns our rues in open air museums, while a whole generation of artists paste their work, stencils and collages all over the city.

Here are a few pictures -oh! nothing, just a teaser- of artwork currently on the streets in the City. If you are in town, enjoy it while you can, because it never last too long. And as a general rule, wherever you are, document street art. It is by essence the most incredible form of artistic expression of our era, and the only traces it will leave are the pictures amateur take.