The Business of “Getting Up”: Street Art and Marketing in Los Angeles

“Street art” is an emerging form of graffiti art that was popularized in the 1990s. I argue that street artists seek to subvert the perceived power of corporate marketing while simultaneously engaging in brand-name marketing. This is made possible by an original overlapping of the aesthetic domains of street art and marketing, in which contemporary marketing campaigns and street artists alike work with the aesthetics of subversion and personal liberation. I suggest that street art is to be understood as a self-referential comment on its relationship to marketing.