University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign M.S. in Library and Information Science, 2012
Valparaiso University M.A. in English Studies and Communication with TESOL certificate, 2009
Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville B.A. in English with minor in Psychology, 2006
“Street Art and Graffiti Resources for Online Study” is his second publication. Michael DeNotto writes that graffiti and street art are connected. The populations of the past gave much importance to graffiti because they were a means …show more content…
Michael DeNotto rightly points out that graffiti art is addressed to a restricted community. In fact, every graffiti retains precise codes that reveal the character of the social context in which it is born. These codes must be decoded by the observer, otherwise it will not be able to take place the passage of information by the artwork to the observer. Decoding, therefore, necessarily imply the knowledge of the visual language codes and this is why graffiti are restricted to a specific community. However, street art is aimed at a wide audience. To demonstrate his point of view, the author gives the example of Bansky and Shepard Fairey, two of the most famous street artists. According to the article, these artists are very popular and get media attention easily. Therefore, many more people have the chance to get in touch with the street art. Then, Michael DeNotto explains with great skills as a street art has aggressively entered the business world. Now, Marketing is a necessity for any professional street artist, but it imposes self-censorship that favors mass consensus and facilitates the diffusion of the product created by the artist. The structure and the shape of the street art are conditioned by the logic of the Internet and its cultural diffusion models. The new street artists borrow the forms of graffiti, but they change it to be able to spread their artworks on the internet, on their websites, on specialized blogs and to allow the public to share them on social networks. Taking Banksy as a model, many artists have become the masters of viral marketing. While the writers have not faced the problem of commercialization, the street artists have calculated everything in terms of