Reflection on Street Art Museums: A Contradictory Institutionalisation – International Council of Museums

Keywords: street art, street art museum. Do street art museums actually exist? If you enter ‘street art museum’ in an internet browser, you will get results and probably lists of such museums. Thus, yes, they do exist in a physical sense. However, doesn’t institutionalising street art by creating dedicated museums go against the very essence of street art? To reflect on this subject, I examine two very different approaches, those of The Street Art Museum Amsterdam (SAMA) and the Urban Nation Museum in Berlin, two institutions that focus on street art and its preservation. From ‘graffiti’ to ‘street art’ Different researchers date the origins of street art in different eras; I would argue that street art began developing in the second half of 20th century − more specifically in the 60s and 70s −, along hip-hop culture in New York. At the time, hip-hop culture was a product of the ghettos, allowing marginalised minorities to express their voices. One of its main aims was to stop violence and give the youth a different form of expression (Chang 2007). The four main elements of hip-hop culture – DJing, MCing, b-boying, and graffiti (Light & Tate 2019) – eventually split and developed...