•Recent developments in digital media created a new ecology for the commercialization of street art.•Social media tools are used to negotiate multiple markets and eliminate intermediaries.•Street art ...remains incompletely commodified: a combination of transgressive culture, legitimate art, and commercial design.
Street art gradually evolved from an activity that normally involves the illegal defacement of property to an established and highly legitimate art form. It has also followed in the footsteps of other countercultural art movements where mainstreaming has been coupled with commercialization, which in turn is understood to progressively erode the integrity of this art form. The article explores how recent developments in digital media created a new ecology for the commercialization of street art as an important genre of urban counterculture. It examines the various ways in which contemporary street art has been commodified including its use in fashion design, city branding, guerrilla marketing campaigns, as tourist attraction in alternative city tours, and whether these developments challenge the countercultural aspirations of street art. The central argument is that despite various forms of commercialization, street art remains an incompletely commodified and quintessentially interstitial practice that combines urban transgressive cultural activity, legitimate art and commercial design, thus continuing to traverse the boundaries of these fields. The analysis identifies three key processes that underlie the incomplete and fragmented commodification of street art: 1) the emergence of multiple, intersecting markets, and strategies to decouple commercial from non-commercial practices; 2) mass merchandising techniques as vehicles to democratize art; 3) the ambivalence of the artwork once it is reproduced primarily through photographs.
The essay examines street art as a lens on the workings of the contemporary public sphere to capture changing uses of urban public spaces and shifting conceptions of social order in the city. It ...explores the explosion in the popularity of street art at a time when urban public space is shrinking and control over its use has tightened considerably through zero-tolerance policing, growing surveillance, privatization, and gentrification. It argues that significant developments in digital media (e.g., the spread of mobile devices, photo sharing, blogging, and social networking sites) have created a new ecology for the documentation, sharing, and global dissemination of “ephemeral” street art that has fueled its popularity while complicating its commercialization, reception, and political impact. It shows how digital technologies mediate the tension between the countercultural aspirations of street art and the multiple ways in which street art is being turned into a commodity.
Research on populism attributes great significance to mapping the distinctive discursive logic of populist reasoning (e.g., the trope of pitting corrupt elites against the people). This article aims ...to move beyond the primary focus on discursive structures to stress the role of symbols, objects, and different modalities of circulation in the political communication of populist ideas, using the case of Hungary. By tracing the history of one of the key symbols of nationalist populism—the image of “Greater Hungary”— from its emergence in the interwar period to its present-day use, the article shows how the meanings and material forms this symbol assumed in political communication that evolved under different political regimes. The analysis builds on extensive archival, ethnographic, and online data to highlight how the diversity of material forms and the conduits through which this image circulated have contributed to its endurance as a key political symbol. Symbols, like the Greater Hungary image, condense complex historical narratives into a powerful sign that can be easily objectified, reproduced, and diffused. Today’s differentiated consumer markets provide convenient conduits for this kind of material circulation. These symbols carry meaning in and of themselves as signs, and once they are turned into everyday objects, they facilitate the normalization of radical politics by increasing their salience and broad visibility.
Flash mobs have spread, like wildfire, across the globe in recent years fuelling new uses of urban public space. The media has wondered if these events are simply pointless pranks, creative public ...performances, or mass social experiments in community building. Existing research emphasizes only the vital role of digital communications technology in the mobilization process. In contrast, this analysis shows through a broad range of examples from New York, London, Berlin, Budapest to Tokyo that these nascent forms of collective action are also important to examine because they provide insight into the intersection and interaction between new communications media and changing uses of physical urban space. It situates flash mobs in a historical context, constructs a basic typology of flash mob activity based on extensive Internet research, and theorizes it as a new form of sociability. It also explores how these examples of urban creativity have inspired commerce and politics to rediscover urban space, increasingly borrowing the organizational techniques of flash mobs in marketing campaigns and social protests.
The article argues that contrary to the widely held view that traces the recent rise of illiberalism in Hungary and Eastern Europe to a weak civil society, the past decade has witnessed a surge of ...civil society activism. But rather than working exclusively towards strengthening and complementing liberal political institutions, civil society has also provided fertile soil to the spread of right‐wing populism, radicalism and xenophobia. The analysis suggests that civil society organisations have in fact played an important role in the right‐wing radicalisation of contemporary Hungarian politics. Conservative civic groups have been instrumental in reinvigorating the symbolic vocabulary of a mythic nationalism that was widespread at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century as well as in the 1930s. The resurrection of nationalist, irredentist and anti‐Semitic symbols and paraphernalia (e.g. greater Hungary car stickers) has been a major vehicle for increasing the public visibility and political impact of these groups. The article shows through case studies of specific organisations how this seemingly anachronistic symbolic repertoire has found new resonance in contemporary Hungarian public life.
In recent years, the concept of boundaries has been at the center of influential research agendas in anthropology, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology. This article surveys ...some of these developments while describing the value added provided by the concept, particularly concerning the study of relational processes. It discusses literatures on (a) social and collective identity; (b) class, ethnic/racial, and gender/sex inequality; (c) professions, knowledge, and science; and (d) communities, national identities, and spatial boundaries. It points to similar processes at work across a range of institutions and social locations. It also suggests paths for further developments, focusing on the relationship between social and symbolic boundaries, cultural mechanisms for the production of boundaries, difference and hybridity, and cultural membership and group classifications.
The author proposes a distinction between the representational, productive and the "domesticating" power of material culture. These embody three analytically distinct but empirically often ...interconnected logics that highlight fundamental aspects of how material culture becomes a political resource.
The article focuses on the interpretive struggles and contests surrounding the adoption and legitimation of fully or partly "imported" ideas. It examines the reception of modernist architecture in ...post-1945 Hungary to improve our understanding of how international cultural paradigms are incorporated into a particular national context. It maps the processes through which modernist architecture came to be institutionalized in Hungary as a cultural link to Western Europe during the Cold War. It shows how this meaning was enacted and reinforced in a crucial polemic, the "Tulip Debate," by imposing a bipolar discourse about social modernization on it-a strategy that often has been deployed to politicize the process of cultural reception in Hungary. The case study suggests that countries with a long history of foreign contact tend to develop society-wide interpretive schemes that are instrumental in channeling international discourse into local debates. The interpretive schemes of one period often may resonate with others, constituting a cluster of techniques that have evolved historically and can be recycled in new situations. They provide actors with discursive strategies for arbitrating between international trends and the national context, and for segmenting the intellectual field in professional and political power struggles. The article underscores the need for a closer scrutiny of the origin and use of discursive structures that shape local interpretive processes in cross-national diffusion.
Much organizational identity research has grappled with the question of identity emergence or change. Yet the question of identity endurance is equally puzzling. Relying primarily on an analysis of ...309 internal bulletins produced at a French aeronautics firm over almost 50 years, we theorize a link between collective memory and organizational identity endurance. More specifically, we show how forgetting in a firm's ongoing rhetorical history—here, the bulletins' repeated omission of contradictory elements in the firm's past (i.e., structural omission) or attempts to neutralize them with valued identity cues (i.e., preemptive neutralization)—sustains its identity. Thus, knowing "who we are" might depend in part on repeatedly remembering to forget "who we were not."
The massive nationalist-populist shift of Hungarian politics and public discourse has proceeded steadily since at least the 2009 European parliamentary elections that launched the far right political ...party, Jobbik 2 (“Movement for a Better Hungary”) on its path to become the second largest political force in the country. Political analysts as well as academic commentators have repeatedly pointed to the existence of a weak civil society—a legacy of nearly half-a-century of communist rule—as an important reason for the continuing democracy deficit of postsocialist countries.
The well-known French historian and political theorist, Jacques Rupnik, for instance, accused Central and
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