Call me a middle-class ‘bobo’, but inspired street art has nothing in common with sprayed-on assertions of ‘me, me, me’
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mong the layers of life in Paris that energise me, I might list: peeling back the city’s music scene all the way to figuring out where, and when, the musicians go to jam together; the unassuming flair of even a basic brasserie; the way one can pivot, in the span of a week, from an art gallery opening to a friend’s concert to another friend’s restaurant to discover his Corsican-influenced menu, and end it by lingering on a terrace, “remaking the world” with others who challenge you – calmly – to see something a different way.
Among the things about this city that exhaust me are the people who cram their way into the Métro without letting you step out first (seriously, what neurons are misfiring in the heads of these people?), and the sheer prevalence of tags. It’s when you leave Paris for a bit and come back that you realise how many tags there are. How swaths of a city that is otherwise arrestingly beautiful look as if a giant toddler high on methamphetamines stumbled through them, scribbling on everything in sight with a giant Sharpie.
In my mind there is, of course, a fuzzy-but-significant divide between street art, graffiti and tags. There is an entire graffiti wall just across the street from my apartment, visible from my living room, and I adore watching its constant state of flux – the greens and blues that slowly replace bubbly, fat oranges and reds. Sometimes, the wall tilts towards pictures; sometimes it tilts towards words. Other places in the neighbourhood regularly get postered (“Stop aux violences faites aux femmes”), there are walls that host the retro-style tile aliens put up by Space Invader or the dark-haired women of Miss. Tic, and some cracks in the pavement have even been filled in by the anonymous street artist Ememem.
