A story of street art in Paris

Annick Rivoire runs an interview with Stéphanie Lemoine and Julien Terral, co-authors of 'In Situ: a panorama of urban art from 1975 to the present'. She deems it to be "the first work that offers a collective vision of a highly creative and heterogeneous movement". And a chance to debunk some conventional wisdom. "It seemed absurd that we should perpetuate this division between street art and grafitti", tells Julien Terral. "We tried to demonstrate that it wasn't a matter of this irreverent and rotten grafitti on the one hand, and these creative and aesthetic street murals on the other." Moreover, "the Parisian movement is not very popular at the grass-roots level, unlike the original New York graffiti art. Perhaps there are more street artists in the suburbs today than when the movement began, but with a few rare exceptions, traditionally all the big names in this movement have been the children of affluent families or of intellectuals."    

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