Presentation of the seminar organized by Medialaws - Dispac and ExP on April 2020

1. HOW DOES GRAFFITI AND STREET ART
EMBODY CULTURAL HERITAGE VALUES?
Art in public spaces and
cultural heritage
Giovanni Maria Riccio
Professor of Law - Università di Salerno
gmriccio@unisa.it

2. Is acceptable the narration of street
art and graffiti art?
• Prehistoric times with the use of petroglyphs on
rock walls to illustrate maps or landmarks
• Graffiti of the Roman Empire is known for
covering a range of topics, from politics and
gladiators, to homosexuality and poetry. (Graffiti is
from Italian “graffiare” = scratch)
• The term “graffiti” came to light in the late
eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries to describe
the etchings found on the walls in Pompeii.

3. Is street art and graffiti art an artistic
movement?
• The connection among graffiti and street art and
other forms of mural art is not fully demonstrated
• Anyway may this affect the legal analysis?
• Legal analysis should only consider in which cases
and under which circumstances and requirements a
work can be protected

4. Can the beautification of a public space
be considered as "cultural heritage"?
• Art galleries began to take an interest in street art:
artist like Basquiat and Haring were catapulted
into the spotlight.
• Street culture is into the mainstream of
contemporary art.
• “American” graffiti did not fit within the Parisian
cityscape: the aesthetics of graffiti responded
differently within the European urban landscape.
The art of stencils develops.

5. Can the beautification of a public space
be considered as "cultural heritage"?
• May we take into account the beauty of a work?
• May we consider the for profit aspect?
• The public’s access to graffiti and street art, in
conjunction with its grassroots method of
communicating public opinion, augments its
significance as cultural heritage.

6. What’s the cultural heritage?
• “For the purpose of this Convention, the following
shall be considered as “cultural heritage”:
monuments . . . groups of buildings . . . sites . . . of
outstanding universal value from the historical,
aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological point of
view”.
• Convention Concerning the Protection of World
Cultural and Natural Heritage that was adopted by
the General Conference of UNESCO in 1972

7. Towards an open definition of
cultural heritage?
• The “intangible cultural heritage” means the
practices, representations, expressions, knowledge,
skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts
and cultural spaces associated therewith – that
communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals
recognize as part of their cultural heritage -
UNESCO (2003)
• Are street art and graffiti art, a part from being
artistic expressions, something which belong to the
cultural patrimony?

9. Art in public spaces
ü Site specific
ü Connected to the local communities
ü Political or social meaning
ü Displayed in public areas
Starting from these premises, who is entitled for the
decision on the works for:
ü Conservation
ü Restoration

10. Is VARA’s procedure the only way?
ü It’s time consuming for the owner
ü Transactional costs are moved on the owner
although he hasn’t commissioned any work
ü Often it isn’t easy to find the author of a work
ü All the choices are in the hands of owner/author
ü Are these works, in some cases, common goods, i.e.
goods which don’t belong to public nor to the
private entities

11. Aspects which should be considered
• Art in public spaces is always ephemeral?
• May we protect (under conservation and
restoration) exclusively commissioned works
(eg works made for public administrations?)
• Who should decide what should be protected
and what not? A public entity (eg Ministry
of Culture), the community, the artist,
others?

12. Some (modest) proposals
Procedure
• The owner of a property, before proceeding with the
destruction or the alteration of the work, should send a
communication to the Public Authority which is
responsible for the territory, in which the work is
located.
• The Public Authority should have a certain period of
time to decide whether the work should be protected or
not.
• In case of non-response, a mechanism of silence-assent
should apply.

13. Alternative way:
• it could be that of placing constraints of
historical and artistic interest on entire
neighborhoods in which the works were
made.
• public administrations could prepare public
calls for street art, where conservative
interventions are included.

14. Who should be involved in the
decision?
• Collective decisions
• Involvement of the public
• Funds for the restoration in the public
commitment of works in the public spaces
• Restoration: involvement of the artist in the
processes of restoration of the works

15. Connection to heritage
Maupal, SuperPope, Rome 2014

16. Connection to heritage
• In January 2014, a wheatpaste poster of Pope Francis
appeared on a street in Rome. Instead of a critical
depiction, the Pope was shown with a white cape, one
fist clenched proudly in the air as he soars above, the
other hand holding a briefcase with the word “valores,”
meaning “values” in Latin.
• The artist, Maupal, portrayed the Pope as a superhero
because he felt he “is the only world leader who stands on
the side of the people.” The SuperPope made
international news, and the Vatican itself even shared a
photo on Twitter. Could this be categorized as spiritual
heritage?

17. Connection to heritage
• The comparison made between cultural heritage and street
art may seem to most people like a gamble: the cultural asset
is such as it is recognized as having a common interest,
through a state provision.
• The street art work is, on the other hand, by its temporary
nature, precarious, subject to deterioration and therefore
difficult to be subjected and successful in cultural interest.
• Nonetheless, we wanted to operate in this parallel plan in
order to highlight how, for such an ephemeral and indefinite
art as "street" art, it would not be so daring to try to outline
a regulation aimed at protecting street art as a "common
good". A doctrinal thesis which proposes that Street art
works can be considered as "other assets" in the landscape
according to the definition provided by art. 2, co. 3 of the
italian Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape.

18. Connection to heritage
• Cultural heritage and landscape heritage, which together
form the cultural heritage, are protected as "testimonies
of civil value" whose main function is precisely that of
collective enjoyment, that is, the same as urban works of
art.
• This widely acceptable doctrinal thesis believes that in
any case the act of assessment by the competent
administration, which may be the regional or municipal
administration, is necessary. The initiation of the
declaration procedure could be initiated at the request of
the local community in which the urban art work insists,
that is normally the Municipality.

19. Connection to heritage
• In France, was launched in October 2018 a
national study on urban art: the promoters
carried out a series of audits, with artists,
associations, collectives and structures
throughout France, in order to communicate to
the Ministry of Culture and the various partner
structures and artists a base, figures and
perhaps even the statutes on which to build the
Federation of Urban Art; to finally advance the
debate and consider a practice as cultural as
artistic.

20. Connection to heritage
Cultural heritage manager of the Australian
National Trust stated that "graffiti is a unique
part of Melbourne's urban fabric, particularly in
our laneways, which attract a huge amount of
visitors and contribute to the city's vibrancy” and
so recognizes graffiti as cultural heritage.

21. Case Studies
5Pointz (District court of New York, second circuit)
The 5Pointz case was the first graffiti matter to be tried
under the Visual Artists Rights Act.
5Pointz was an extremely significant landmark within
the graffiti community, since 2002, not only in New
York City, but worldwide.
An abandoned factory located in Queens, New York
City, 5Pointz has been nicknamed the “graffiti mecca,”
for its international acclaim as the largest legal outdoor
graffiti space in the United States.

22. Case Studies
5Pointz (District court of New York, second
circuit)
In November 2013, 5Pointz was completely
whitewashed in preparation for its demolition as
decreed by its owners, thus covering over all of the
graffiti: the artists asked the New York District Court
to inhibit the destruction of their works, a request
that the court hearing did not comply.
Four years later, the New York District Court accepted
the applications of some of the authors of the
destroyed works, albeit belatedly, condemning the site
owner to pay the maximum compensation of $
6,750,000.

23. Case Studies
5Pointz (District court of New York, second
circuit)
The sentence is based on the Visual Artists Right Act
(VARA) of 1990 which recognized for the first time, in
the United States copyright system, moral copyright,
albeit limited to the works of figurative art in single or
limited copies, providing , in particular, the right of
authors of works of “recognized importance” to
oppose their destruction. Individual works—however
fleeting—rose in the culture’s estimation, making the
artists universal darlings, beloved by museums,
galleries, auction houses, and people the world over.

24. 5Pointz, New York

25. Hogre, Rome, 2020

26. Hogre Case
Hogre, Parco degli acquedotti: street art vs.
cultural heritage
Recently the Italian artist Hogre has created a
work on the infill of a Roman cistern, inside the
Parco degli Acquedotti. Therefore on a protected
cultural heritage: on an asset subject to
archaeological restrictions.
A part of the art critics sees this work as
disruptive and as a return to the origins of street
art.

27. Hogre Case
Hogre, Parco degli acquedotti: street art vs. cultural
heritage
From a purely legal point of view: considering two
different elements.
On the one hand, the “frame” on which Hogre has
crept in, that is, a portion of a cistern of the second
century A.D., part of the Villa delle Vignacce, an
asset therefore subject to archaeological constraints;
on the other, the new work insistent on the tank itself.

28. Hogre Case
Hogre, Parco degli acquedotti: street art vs. cultural
heritage
The work made by Hogre: a discretionary value, which
almost leads to the “embellishment”, perhaps conceived
for the improvement of a place which, despite having
lived of ancient splendor and even if bound has
objectively been abandoned to forms of decay.
In this way you inevitably risk a dangerous drift: that is,
to leave the choice and whether or not to intervene on a
tied asset to arbitrariness and personal taste.