I was expecting a lot more street art in Paris. I don’t know why. I guess in my mind, I had the pictures from the riots earlier in the year and just imagined a whole host of disaffected clever youth with spray cans doing up the town. Of course, we were staying in the posh center, surrounded by the government and cultural institutions that aren’t going to take to leaving any kind of tag up, if you could even get it on there without a swarm of guards descending. So there’s that. We did make it out to the edge of the center in Aggrandisement 13, but there wasn’t a single thing to note there.
I am only guessing that if we would have made it out of the inner ring, and into the poorer districts, there might be more. Though I’ve often pondered the difference between street art and pointless tagging is a slim one and perhaps those mysterious suburbs are just filled with depressing blight. I did not find out on this trip.
What stencils, pastes, and paint we did see were mostly very sly and clever. It’s funny to be addicted to this stuff and yet have no interest in doing it. Well, maybe some paste sometime…
