Graffiti Gains New Respect

By CLAUDIA BARBIERI

Published: June 9, 2009

PARIS — Like a slow-burning fuse, graffiti has smoldered in the contemporary art world for decades: omnipresent in the streets yet not quite hot enough to catch fire in the market. But this year it exploded, with graffiti and “street art” shows in major museums and gallery spaces both sides of the Atlantic — and people have been lining up round the block to get in.

In March and April, a show of graffiti tags in the south-west gallery of the Grand Palais, one of the top Paris exhibition venues, was a media and public sensation.

“The lines around the building every day were even longer than those for the Warhol exhibition next door,” said Alain-Dominique Gallizia, a French architect who created the show, during an interview.

On 300 identical rectangular canvases, Mr. Gallizia commissioned matched pairs of paintings from leading street artists worldwide, to create a panorama of graffiti’s historical and geographical development from 1970s New York subway roots to modern urban landscapes as far-flung as Australia and Brazil.

Included in the show were works by Taki 183, the onetime New York delivery boy credited with first turning signature tags into a form of self expression; Lady Pink, an early female tagger; Bando, known in everyday life as Philippe Lehman, a scion of the Lehman banking family, who first brought New York-style graffiti to France in the 1980s; and Nunca, the Brazilian street artist from São Paulo who shot to international fame a year ago when he was chosen as one of six artists to spray paint giant murals on the river facade of the Tate Modern, in London.

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