Over whiskey rocks at the Mandrake Bar in Culver City, I found myself in a conversation about “street art.” I began my career at a magazine that had deep roots in street art culture, and I often found myself running errands to Reed Space, site of the infamous “pigeon Nikes” riot, where grown men attacked young skater kids in order to get a pair of collaboration sneakers, unique for their tiny embroidered pigeon. I paid my rent for a few months with limited edition toys that the magazine collaborated on with street artists. The magazine was basically a contemporary of Aaron Rose’s Beautiful Losers film, complete with interviews from KAWS, Ed Templeton, ESPO, the whole crew. Street and skate culture seemed important at this time, because the art market was glutted with self-important bozos like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. It was billed as art by the people, for the people—the artists were rogue and anti-establishment. Anybody could view it, and it couldn’t be sold. It was a natural extension of the tagging and throw-ups of bygone graf artists from the ‘80s. By the time I left, the street art second wave had jumped the shark. The magazine rarely covered street artists anymore—I was not opposed to the shift and helped facilitate it, as I had grown bored with the posturing and whiney nature of the scene—and one of the last articles I wrote for them was about the first major street art-only auction at Phillips de Pury.
      The conversation at the Mandrake inevitably shifted to new MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch’s upcoming “Art in the Streets” exhibition. Jeffrey, as those in Los Angeles have mononym-ed him, has deep roots in the street art game, having built one of the few respected galleries in New York that had the gumption to work with artists like Shepard Fairey, SWOON, Os Gemeos, and Barry McGee. Whether or not MOCA’s donors care about street art genuinely, or as part of a groupthink bandwagon surrounding the show, remains to be seen, but this is exactly what Deitch was hired for: a Jose Conseco-like ability to pump pop ideas into the galleries.
     Already the exhibition has been fraught with controversy—in December, Deitch commissioned a street artist by the name of Blu to do a mural on the side of the Geffen Contemporary. Strangely, before hopping on a plane to rub elbows with other art stars during the grotesquery that is Art Basel Miami Beach, he forgot to ask Blu what he was going to do. Upon his return to L.A., Deitch was stunned to find that Blu had nearly completed his mural: an anti-war statement depicting coffins draped in dollar signs in lieu of the American flags that typically adorn the coffins of soldiers sent from overseas. Deitch immediately ordered the mural painted over and started a firestorm of criticism. At worst, Deitch was censoring Blu, a big no-no in the street art community; street art thrives and survives solely on the ability to be performed as a solitary, unmitigated act—it’s political by nature. At best, Deitch’s blooper was not obtaining a project plan from Blu.
    Of course, the street art community took this controversy to the bastion of disseminated opinion, the internet, to express their disdain for Deitch’s move. Marc Schiller of street art blog Wooster Collective tweeted, “If MOCA is just a US version of the Tate show (ie safe) it’ll be a HUGE mistake on Deitch’s part” [sic]. Blu himself wrote to street art-friendly site Animal New York’s Marina Galperina, “the facts are known: Blu is asked by Moca to paint a wall … the wall is painted (not completely finished unfortunately) … Moca decides to erase the wall … the wall is now white … the images are already public … everyone can make his own idea about the event … for everything else … time will tell…” [sic].
    The quote from Schiller addresses the shift of street art from the street to the art complex. In 2008, London’s Tate Modern invited six street artists to paint murals on the riverside façade of the museum. The resulting imagery felt boxed in and ghetto-ized, more like the offspring of half-assed institutional Johnny-come-lately-ism than the historical evaluation that Deitch seems able to make with his personal experience through his gallery. Because of this, “Art in the Streets” is actually a clever move on Deitch’s part: as one of the few directors of a world-class institution that knows anything about street art, his will be considered a benchmark should the street-art-in-public-institutions phenomenon catch on.
    The question that Deitch has been asking for the past few years is how to keep the integrity of street art as it passes through the market from street to primary and beyond. The Wooster Collective and the like depict a fiercely opinionated and unforgiving group of critics, and their criticisms of Deitch have run deep for years. However, even these folks cannot underestimate the importance Deitch’s show presents to their own economy. In fact, it has been noted that many street artists are laying off Deitch in the Blu controversy; perhaps some don’t want to jeopardize their inclusion in the show. The politics of street art in Los Angeles can be just as sticky as those of gallery art in New York.
    It doesn’t take a museum studies scholar to understand that museums are not the best place in the world for controversy. Adel Abdessemed’s “Don’t Trust Me,” which portrayed the slaying of various animals for consumption in Mexico through a series of videos, was shut down within five days of its San Francisco Art Institute opening after pretty much everyone in the world (including artists) spoke out against the poignant piece. And more recently, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery removed the late artist David Wojnarowicz’ “A Fire in My Belly” video from Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the behest of Catholic protestations due to a brief section of the video portraying ants crawling over a crucifix. It is not known whether MOCA received any complaints for Blu’s piece, but Deitch sited the fact that the Geffen faces the L.A. Veterans’ Affairs Hospital as a factor in its whitewashing. The building also faces the “Go For Broke” monument, honoring the Japanese-American soldiers who fought in the Pacific during the Second World War. Does the metaphor of the military complex being a moneymaking system for America in any way belittle the military wounded? Perhaps. Do Japanese-American veterans feel like Blu’s statement oversimplifies American military policy to the point of insult to those that came back in caskets from WWII? While both organizations have insinuated that they some within their groups feel the mural was “in bad taste,” neither had made any sort of complaint to MOCA.
Street art work has transcended into the museum in previous eras—the Whitney did a “graffiti show” in the mid-‘80s, and of course, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were the legitimization progenitors of the form—but street art’s immersion into the “art world” continues to be controversial. After all, it began outside of it, and is most powerful outside of it.
I look at street art on blogs today and see an evolving form. There is work that transforms buildings in impoverished neighborhoods into giant canvases. There is work that makes interesting, thoughtful statements in an arguably less ham-fisted way than Banksy. There is totally good work out there by totally good artists, my drinking partner at the Mandrake and I decide, but it may be because the work is outside, in its natural habitat. Whether or not the museum is the right place for this type of expression remains debatable.