Street art as “street fetish”- a new signifier of social class? The case of Brazil’s “Beverley Hills”

ABSTRACT

This study explores street art's changing symbolic value and emplacement, the latter of which is reaching beyond the city limits and so-called 'public' space, where commissioned practices are being carried out on individuals' private homes and elite households in non-urban spaces. In this paper I focus on the process of “street fetish”, which has resulted from street art's contemporary institutionalization and shaped by complex socio-cultural, political, and economic process including de-subculturalization and artification. These microprocesses are intertwined with the convergence of authenticity and commercialization, and inseparable from practical, symbolic, organizational, discursive, and semiotic shifts taking place within the (street) art world concerning its market value, which are shaped by and simultaneously shape the field of cultural production and highly influenced by global capitalism. My investigation focuses on the work of one Brazilian street artist, RDO SAMP and his commissioned street art on a private home in the beach town resort of Jurerê International (Florianópolis, Santa Catarina), one of the most affluent towns in the country, which was designed by the world renowned, Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer and a place, where class distinctions center on enculturated symbolic and material economies.

KEYWORDS:

• Semiotic assemblage
• street art
• fetish
• Brazil
• social class

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank RDO SAMP, Lena, Maria Helena Petry Makowiecky and others for allowing me to conduct interviews with them for this project. I thank RDO SAMP and Maria Helena for granting me permission to reproduce images and artwork in this article. I would also like to thank Luciana Mattos for transcribing all Portuguese interviews. Finally, I want to extend my thanks to Tommaso M. Milani, Ricardo Campos, David Karlander and Robert Blackwood for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. All shortcomings are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For Campos and Leal, urban art is understood as “an art movement marked by commercial, regulated and commissioned practices, largely non- transgressive, that are essentially rooted in the worlds of graffiti and street art” (2021, 975).

2 Pixação is distinct from graffiti and originated in São Paulo during the 1980s. It involves disruptive manifestations and is often classified as vandalism and a high-risk exercise, which often results into violent situations since it involves invading private property. Deaths of artists may also result due to pixação’s high placement on residential buildings. Pixação consists of a highly codified language that perceives its own strangeness as a distinctive element in the landscape (Campos and Leal 2021, 979).

3 For real estate prices in JI as well as Ronaldinho’s current house listing, see https://mardejurere.com/en/buy-and-sell/VCI0004.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kellie Gonçalves

Kellie Gonçalves is a sociolinguist whose research interests are at the interdisciplinary interface between sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, human geography, mobility studies and social semiotics. Her recent publications include Domestic Workers Talk: Language Use and Social Practices in a Multilingual Workplace (with A. Schluter, Multilingual Matters, 2023); Labour Policies, Language Use and the ‘New’ Economy - The Case of Adventure Tourism. (Palgrave Macmillan 2020); Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-collar Workplaces (with H. Kelly-Holmes. (Eds.) Routledge, 2021). Kellie is currently book review editor of the journal Linguistic Landscape.