(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Just like the recent violence against peaceful protesters, a new graffiti policy adopted by the city of Moscow reflects how the city of my birth has deteriorated under an authoritarian government that pretends to improve it at a huge cost. Elsewhere, thoughtful street art policies have driven enormous organic improvements of the urban environment -- but implementing them requires an appreciation for freedom that today's Russian authorities lack.
The new rules, adopted last month, essentially outlaw any street art experimentation. They require artists and building owners to apply for permits needing the approval of no fewer than seven different city departments. They will only be granted only for murals that “popularize outstanding personalities, historic events, science, sports and art.” There’s also a list of what is impermissible, including depictions of smoking and drinking; any kind of advertising, including for nonprofits and causes; violence; images that may offend members of any social group or profession; images of explosives except fireworks; pictures that “discredit parents and educators” – it goes on and on. Even with permission, graffiti can only be painted between April and November, and the approval of a city-appointed commission is required when the work is finished, otherwise the building owner may be ordered to remove it.
If these rules are rigorously enforced – and there’s no reason to expect that they won’t be – they’ll spell the end of a vibrant culture that has flourished in Moscow, and even received the city government’s support, especially in freer times before the 2014 Crimea annexation. (In 2013, a huge street art festival resulted in 150 large murals by Russian and foreign masters of the genre.) The city government is acquiring a monopoly over what should be considered beautiful on its streets – a totalitarian approach unworthy of a true global city, a status Moscow has always craved and sometimes deserved.
Other major cities have widely divergent, but almost always less restrictive, approaches to street art. In New York, graffiti are only allowed with the building owner’s express permission, otherwise enforcement is harsh; spray paint isn’t even sold to minors. Berlin, which has some of the world’s most daring and impressive street art, has formally adopted a similar approach – in theory, one can even go to jail for three years for defacing buildings – but enforcement is lax because the city has a reputation to maintain. Effectively, the onus is on underground artists to produce images that no one will want to remove; that makes for some memorable walls throughout the city.
In London, regulation is up to local councils. Some are street art friendly, allowing all kinds of activity except the most primitive "tagging" -- essentially gang signatures on walls -- in the belief that good graffiti draw tourists, while others impose strict bans regardless of building owners’ preferences.
In my view, the city with the best street art policy is Lisbon, which adopted a two-pronged approach to the phenomenon in 2008 to deal with ever louder complaints from businesses and residents in the city center. On the one hand, it stepped up antigraffiti enforcement in most of the city and boosted spending on clean-up campaigns; on the other hand, it created the Urban Art Gallery under the auspices of the city’s Department of Cultural Heritage. This agency has turned one problem neighborhood after another into makeshift galleries where every kind of artwork is allowed, including tagging. The idea is to find places where local residents don’t mind it because it makes the street prettier – and in the end, safer. Shady characters flee from the city-backed urban art festivals; urban artists are also good at self-organization, so art tends to displace crime.
The Urban Art Gallery’s projects – and sometimes its protection of worthy art that springs up without its blessing – have created a constantly changing, competitive environment in which the most impressive works survive for years because nobody dares paint them over, but the more transitory works disappear in days or weeks.
Empowering building owners leads to commercialization. Leaving decisions to city officials kills spontaneity. Having no policy at all leaves a city’s walls to gangs and talentless taggers to deface. Lisbon has managed to avoid all three of these traps. As a result, looking at graffiti is perhaps the best way to see the city now. The scene has drawn many of the best artists from Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, and the sheer variety of art on the city’s walls is astounding even to a jaded Berliner. Lisbon is not a rich city, but its seedier areas, especially in the center, have been transformed by the imaginative, often socially conscious and politically opinionated work that ranges from tiny paste-ups with haunting anonymous poetry to masterfully executed murals taking up an entire wall.
Moscow is much wealthier than Lisbon. Its per capita economic output, adjusted for purchasing power parity, of $54,000 is about 51% higher than that of the Portuguese capital. As the shopping window of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the metropolis appears not to need the kind of bottom-up initiative that has transformed Lisbon’s look and feel. It would rather invest in top-down beautification, which leaves more opportunities for corruption as streets are needlessly repaved and facades repainted. In such a city, art can only be the product of bureaucratic decisions. On the plus side: That leaves a lot off walls to be painted on when both the city and the country are free again.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
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