Instagraff: How the rich kids of Instagram killed the graffiti writer

Description

Graffiti is now a feature of urban centres, music videos, advertising campaigns, art galleries, auction houses, and magazines. However, this has not always been the case. The saturation of images of graffiti in ‘mainstream’ spaces demonstrates that graffiti subculture has developed at a rapid pace since the birth of Hip Hop graffiti during the 1970s. This study examines the social and technological advances that have prompted graffiti culture to appear in the mainstream. Recognising the birth of Web 2.0, social media and user-created content, as a key cultural development; this study analyses images from social media accounts, relating the images to the works of Baudrillard (1970), simulacra and simulation, Goffman (1959) Presentation of self, and Burgess (2007) Vernacular creativity and New Media. Proposing that, within the liminality of cyber/space, the process of vernacular creativity as a mode of self-presentation promotes the replication of existing graffiti images to such a point, that cyber/space graffiti can be considered a procession of simulacra. This flattening of graffiti culture into simulacra dislocates contemporary graffiti from its subcultural deviant origins, including the associated risks, whilst simultaneously offering the subcultural rewards associated with traditional graffiti subculture.