Street Art VS Graffiti
Street art and graffiti have been compared for years, and some wondered “what’s the difference between them? That’s the question we aim to answer today, we’re going to explain the exact difference between street art and graffiti. To begin, we must first understand how art forms are made, and categorized. There’s a topic called the Three Pillars of Art, and these are 3 categories of fundamentals that allow for art to exist, they are as follows.
Elements of Art
Art Form Specific Fundamentals (also called a fundamental set)
Technique.
Now the first and second pillars are the important ones for categorizing art since the elements of art are the foundation of all art. It’s impossible to draw or paint anything without using one, or any combination of Line, Shape, Form, Value, Space, Color, and Texture. The fundamental set on the other hand governs, defines and categorizes the art form by generating a list of basics specific to what you’re painting. Also, the art form-specific fundamentals will work with the elements of art to define a style, and rendering threshold for the art form. For example, cartoons might use anatomy gesture pose, and expression as their fundamental set. Still, they also need to use relevant elements of art in specific ways that work in conjunction with the fundamental set to remain a cartoon. Now in addition to that, each form of art has a hierarchy it places its fundamentals on. Really the fundamental/ fundamentals at the very top of the first and second pillars are the most defining for a form of art.
To keep things simple on this topic, that’s all we need to define an art form. Graffiti has a defined fundamental set, and this makes graffiti a category of art. Street art doesn’t define a fundamental set, and in addition, it doesn’t indicate how the elements of art are being used like the term realism or various art forms do. For this reason, the term street art is similar to Renaissance where terms like these define art movements. Terms of this kind depict a place, time period, or general idea for an art form, but they don’t indicate what was painted or how. You might have a Renaissance portrait, landscape, still life, or even a piece of music, in the same way street art might be a cartoon character, graffiti, portrait, landscape so on and so forth.
Street art is a general term used to describe art done in the streets, commonly illegal but this can include legal works as well. This means any graffiti in the streets is street art but not all street art is graffiti. The term graffiti takes this a step further to define something more specific as graffiti is a letter-based art form with a fundamental set. If you’re new to graffiti or simply want to make the learning process easier, check out our new book “The Ultimate Graffiti Guide Book” That’s pretty much the difference between the two and that’s why street art isn’t an art form in the way people think it is.
