Check out this video posted on Wooster Collective recently; this really complicates my thinking about the work of the “whitespacers”–city workers that cover up street art with (usually) white paint. Throwing Rothko’s work into the mix certainly encourages me to re-examine and rethink what I’ve been looking at (and how I’ve been looking at it) in this city. At the heart of this issue are competing definitions of “art” and “aesthetics” that are played out in public spaces–both the work of street artists and whitespacers count as “art”, but both are different manifestations of different definitions.

Advertisement