Julian Phethean’s first canvas in London was a shed in his backyard, where he covered the walls with bold spray lettering. When he took his art to the city streets in the 1980s, it was largely unwelcome — and he was even arrested a few times.
“We had no place to practice,” he said. “It was just considered vandalism.”
These days, the canvases come to Mr. Phethean, better known as the muralist Mr. Cenz. Recent facades he’s shared with his large following include an abstract mural at a Tesla showroom and a portrait of Biggie Smalls, sponsored by Pepsi Max.
“I never would have imagined I could do this for a living,” he said.
Landlords looking to attract young professionals once escaped revolutionary scrapes. This was before graffiti moved from counterculture to mainstream. Now building owners are willing to pay for it.
From Berlin to London to Miami, the wider acceptance of graffiti has attracted developers looking to expand into trendy areas, companies looking to relocate to neighborhoods and brands looking for creative ways to advertise their products.
But that attention to once-neglected neighborhoods has driven up rents, leaving artists, fans and local officials with a dilemma: What happens after the commercialization of street art that brought character?
Modern graffiti traces back to the anti-establishment expression of the 1960s and 1970s, when anyone with a can of paint could mark the sidewalks of Philadelphia and the subway cars of New York. In Soviet-era Berlin, protesters tore down the western side of the wall, while the eastern side remained empty – until it fell in 1989, opening huge new canvases overnight.
The gallery world took notice, but it was social media and the fame of artists like Banksy, Vhils and Lady Pink that pushed him to a wider audience. What followed was a movement that experts say was replicated from Australia to Argentina, as street art was added to a neighborhood’s cultural baby.
Take Shoreditch in east London for example: Decades ago, developers considered it a run-down industrial area. However, it was a haven for artists who used cheap rents to build a creative enclave.
“What artists bring is a sense of buzz: newness, creativity, trends,” said Rosie Haslem, managing director of Streetsense UK, a consultancy. “Hipsters attract more hipsters who have more money and can start paying higher prices.”
This buzz also attracted developers and companies who sought to capitalize on Shoreditch’s popularity. A former tea packing factory now houses a branch of the private members’ club Soho House. Across the street is Amazon’s largest corporate office in the area.
Spray painters continue to add political messages to the mosaic of art in east London. But they are nestled among more commercial interests: hand-painted campaigns sponsored by L’Oréal, Sky and Adidas, and road tours that treat art as a tourist attraction.
Many campaigns come from agencies that act as intermediaries between artists and businesses interested in their work.
“We were splashing in the water and a wave came,” said Lee Bofkin, co-founder of Global Street Art, a London advertising agency. In the decade since its founding, it has grown to more than 30 employees, and Adidas, Moncler and Valentino have leased its walls.
The developers are responsible for one of the 300 or so murals that dot Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood. The windowless walls of the former garment district had long attracted graffiti artists, but a developer helped launch the 2009 Wynwood Walls, an open-air gallery visited by three million people each year.
“We had to find a carrot to try to bring investment to the area,” said Manny Gonzalez, the executive director of the Wynwood Business Improvement District. The street art, he said, was the lure. “We knew we had to preserve the art.”
Five years ago, there were no office buildings in Wynwood. Now, tenants include Spotify, accounting firm PwC and venture capital Founders Fund. Sony Music has leased office space there. And tech companies are coming from San Francisco and New York, Mr. Gonzalez said.
Those workers will need somewhere to live, and developers are betting they’ll stay local. At the forefront is the Related Group, a developer that has built a “shortcut to market” apartment building with a rooftop pool and a signature mural by artist El Mac. Last year, Related broke ground on luxury condominiums and commissions artists to add visual flair to its buildings.
“Every lobby, every hallway, common area, public area of the building has art in it,” said Patricia Hanna, art director at Related. “The philosophy is to continue what Wynwood is.”
For investors, supporting buildings in these areas is paying off. In Shoreditch, a prime workspace cost about $90 per square foot to rent in the final quarter of 2023, according to CBRE, up 112 percent from the same quarter in 2008. Rents in the City of London, the financial district, rose by 40 percent in the same period.
The asking price for office leases in Wynwood was about $80 per square foot in the fourth quarter of 2023, 83 percent higher than the Miami-Dade County average, according to Colliers.
The eastern side of the Berlin Wall in Friedrichshain is now an outdoor gallery and the average rent in the area has doubled in the past 10 years, higher growth than in neighboring districts, according to Savills. Developers tried to bring this artistic buzz to other neighborhoods: A popular exhibit, The Haus, was hosted in a former bank by a developer, Pandion, who later replaced the old building with stylish condominiums. They have all been sold.
A large outdoor facade could cost six figures, said Charlotte Specht, co-founder of Basa Studio, an agency in Berlin that has helped street artists work with brands like Maybelline and Netflix. Brands looking to campaign have a demographic in mind for their target customers: “They use Uber, they have an Apple Mac, they get their latte to go, they travel,” Ms. Specht said.
Street art had acted as a “powerful engine” to transform certain neighborhoods into economic and cultural centers, said Thomas Zabel, managing director of Savills Germany. “Everybody wants to live there.”
But officials wonder how to regulate street art and whether commercialization is changing a neighborhood’s identity.
In Lisbon, a municipal body called the Urban Art Gallery presides over new creations, resulting in an artistic extravaganza: street art descends on footpaths and train stations, and officials have pushed street art festivals and tours to beautify the roughest neighborhoods city’s. International students, digital nomads and foreign investors have rushed in.
Researchers say Lisbon has successfully used this art to brand itself as a fashion destination. But its revival is divisive for the city’s less privileged, who say they have been pushed out of their homes.
In Wynwood, property owners promise they intend to preserve the neighborhood’s artistic heritage. New buildings must include some art on their facades, and hand-painted advertisements are illegal.
But these regulations, some say, have led to a reduction in organic spaces for artists, who are unable to make the most of the opportunities granted. “Developers become gatekeepers to some extent as to what the public sees,” said Allison Freidin, co-founder of the Miami Graffiti Museum. “And you hope the developers make a great decision.”
A more difficult cost to quantify is the relocation of residents who can no longer afford to live there.
“It really seems like a success story: Oh, look how art turned this desolate area of a wasteland into this beautiful successful hipster area with restaurants and tourists,” said Rafael Schacter, an anthropologist at University College London. Art, he believes, was complicit in erasing communities because they weren’t “the right kind of people.”
Residents have been pushed back. In Kreuzberg, a cultural haven near the old Berlin Wall, residents criticized the opening of a Google tech incubator, which eventually moved elsewhere. Artists there have painted over their own murals to protest gentrization and expressed concerns about content being allowed to replace public art. In Los Angeles, graffiti artists risked violating charges to destroy an abandoned luxury tower, which in turn fueled curiosity about it.
Aware of the tensions, businesses have launched philanthropic arms that fund their commercial projects. Some, like Global Street Art, paint murals in local neighborhoods. Others, like Basa Studio, say they want to help artists get paid fairly for their contributions.
But places like Shoreditch have already lost their edge as they have gone mainstream, said Ms Haslem of consultancy Streetsense. “The danger of commercializing or commercializing some of this graffiti is that you sanitize it,” he said.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” said Dean Stockton, who painted for years under the name D*Face. He was frustrated by the number of busloads of tourists staring as he worked on a recent Wynwood mural with the words “I WANT TO LEAVE.”
“If you’re going to dance with the devil,” he said, “make sure you get paid handsomely.”
