I’ve yet to be drawn in by the mural fever that seems to have been taking over in the last decade or so. Areas like Camden and Shoreditch in London run ‘Street Art Tours’ as an edgy alternative to the double-decker ‘hop-on-hop-offs’, all for as much as £20 per person, whilst local councils pay collectives to decorate anything, from the local high street to the estates. In 2015/16 it seemed as if every other person I followed on Instagram had a post involving some post outside this or that mural. The final straw: the rise in commercial street art – hand painted adverts – bringing to a wall near you an apparently more human alternative to the standard sterile corporate billboard. As of the past 5 years, if you do choose to sink that £20 into a street art tour of Shoreditch, you’re just as likely to come across a Gucci or Swatch ad as you are a local masterpiece.

When it comes to hand-painted adverts, an article from publication ‘The Drum’ has this to say: ‘HPA [hand painted advertisement] looks ‘stop-you-in-your-tracks’ great; is human-powered, which means a lot in the digital age; is steeped in traditional painting techniques; makes great content for social media and is shared by passers-by. Let’s not forget too that it helps working artists make a living. That’s a smorgasbord of positives!’ The article was, of course, written by Global Street Art Agency’s CEO. 

With the help of companies like Global Street Art Agency, transnational corporations such as Unilever can appropriate the aesthetics of charming local green-grocers without having to do any of that nonsense of actually building community relations, paying workers decent wages or even selling particularly good products. In terms of creating work for artists, one-off jobs like the odd painted advert make little difference to artists working in a sector that has seen a 35% decrease in government funding over the last decade, or the university art students whose courses’ funding have been halved since 2021. And as far as honouring the history and practice of the art form goes, it’s not as if these murals always coexist with pre-existing works by local artists or operate with any community input at all. In August of this year, Amazon was forced to issue an apology after painting over a locally beloved mural in Manchester of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis with an ad for a new album by Aitch. (The Ian Curtis mural was created by artist ‘Akse_P19’ to raise awareness of the importance of mental health and pay tribute to the artist, who lived with depression all his life, eventually committing suicide at age 23. The project was completed in conjunction with a 24/7 mental health crisis text line, Shout 85258.) This is just one example of a number of similar corporate, mural-related gaffs that has seen local art become displaced by ads. More generally, there is the issue of the appropriation of the medium of street from communities that, for decades, were incarcerated for the same practice which now makes companies like GSAA and their clients millions. It is those same communities to whom they should be grateful for developing the practice and earning the art form the respectability (and profitability) that it has today.  

These issues cannot be entirely laid at Global Street Art Agency’s feet but there’s no need to wear a righteous costume and claim to be “community minded” whilst working with such “champions of the people” as Samsung, Unilever, and Amazon. To GSAA and all the corporations they work with that are opting for the brush instead of the billboard to advertise: Please, just take off the mask. We know who’s under there.