SAO PAULO (AP) — When completed in 2015, the mayor's office hailed the graffiti panels along Avenida 23 de Maio as Latin America's largest open-air mural — 70 works of street art stretching for more than 3 miles (5 kilometers) along a boulevard connecting a well-to-do district with the city center. The mayor even donned a pair of orange coveralls and wielded a spray gun to put a thin layer of gray paint over the murals — angering people who considered the paintings part of the city's cultural heritage and sparking a debate about what is art and what should be protected. Removal of the murals was among the first acts of Doria's "Pretty City" campaign: a traveling circus of street cleaners and maintenance workers who install new trash cans, plant trees, pick up garbage and cover up graffiti around Sao Paulo every weekend. Doria's administration has increased fines for pichacao, is installing cameras to catch practitioners, and encourages everyone, especially taxi drivers, to report it. Some of Doria's critics tie the cleanup campaign to other parts of his business-oriented agenda: a privatization plan to sell off city stadiums and open bids for concessions in public parks as well as an effort to revitalize the dilapidated downtown, an important canvas for pichacao. New York has largely won its war to banish the graffiti that once covered subway cars — an art style several graffiti artists in Brazil have cited as inspiration — but many New Yorkers protested when the owner of a Queens warehouse known as 5Pointz, which had become a shrine to graffiti art, painted over its murals in 2013 ahead of its demolition. Doria has now promised a "museum of street art" to showcase authorized, privately funded murals by artists chosen by an independent committee. Some critics say the mayor's cleanup campaign is a superficial attempt to attract private investment by papering over Sao Paulo's inconvenient realities — a largely abandoned downtown, a big population of poor and homeless, and the co-existence of rich neighborhoods that equal anything in Manhattan with marginalized areas.
Comment on Sao Paulo street art debate over what makes cities livable
By SARAH DiLORENZO, Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle: World
Fri, 03/24/2017 - 12:17pm
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