Street Art vs. Alternative Marketing: Ambiguity and Parasitic Reception

The rise of alternative marketing, which uses non-traditional supports like street art, creates a confusing overlap between commercial and artistic practices. In Santiago, Chile, advertising agency Unitas used unauthorized colorful tags by young Chileans as a backdrop for a trompe-l'oeil poster promoting Faber-Castell pencils, implying the tags' vibrancy came from the pencils. This exemplifies alternative marketing's parasitic effect: it appropriates the plastic quality of tags for a commercial end, making it impossible to appreciate the tags solely for their aesthetic value. Similarly, in Copenhagen, agency Bates Y&R for Jeep painted parking spaces in absurd locations (on a building, on stairs) to suggest the vehicle's off-road capability, mimicking street art's spontaneity. The ambiguity is reciprocal: Spanish artist SpY's work 'Street Wars' transformed a road sign into a spaceship with green tubes, which could be mistaken for a Star Wars promotion. The author argues that, like the imitation of a nightingale's song, the mere possibility that street art is actually marketing contaminates its reception. However, this double sabotage also opens possibilities: the TOSAT group in Toronto replaced advertising posters with their own art, and such hybrid practices may lead to a new genre. The text is an opinion-review by Bruno Trentini, a PhD in aesthetics, published in artpress in 2010.