Simply ART: Rich Graffiti Artist, Oxymoron??!

What does Bill Clinton, Bono, chef Jamie Oliver and JR, a 27-year old graffiti artist from Paris have in common? No, idea? Well, all have won the prestigious TED award which is given to exceptional individuals plus a merry little $100,000 to use in a humanitarian project. The award was announced on October 19th.

JR, who by the way calls himself a photograffeur and not a street artist, has done a very interesting line of work. It all started when he found a photo camera on the subway. It all then spiraled from taking photographs of parisian thugs and importing them on the bourgeois districts to pasting huge photographs of palestinian and israeli people doing grimaces all over the “Wall”. In 2008, he chose Africa, Brazil and Asia, as his next destinations, and for his subjects, women! He decided to portray their faces and paste them all over the public space, which of course is illegal. Far from finished, JR constantly moves from one location to the next to gather pictures.

What is truly interesting about his work is that it doesn’t follow the classical rules of art. There is no personality attached to the work, no physical identity per se since he remains totally anonymous. There are no professional judges, no formal exhibition space and there is no price. The people are the subjects and the judges at the same time. The exhibition space is the biggest gallery in the world; the cities’ streets. In this art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators. JR’s purpose is to show the world these people from those rural and urban spaces in a very peculiar manner, and he makes sure that these people stories' get heard. In an interview with the New York Times, he said: “If there’s one thing I’ve always taken care of with my work, it’s that it’s never an advertisement for anything other than the work itself and for the people it’s about — no ‘Coca-Cola presents’”.

Ok, so his work is really interesting and appealing but I think that it’s time to talk about what a particular person he is as well. Imagine someone who’s career started with a found camera and no previous artistic learning. Who installs his photographs, with just a bunch of friends to help him out and does it all around the earth. Nice, right? And just to make him even cooler, every time he appears in public he wears a hat and dark sunglasses so as to remain as anonymous as possible. JR also owns a foundation that sells some of his photographs to museums or private collectors so that his camera keeps rolling. What’s so great about JR is that law and distances do not stop him from producing some shocking works. His motivation, his ideas and his carelessness for the law is what keeps him on the front line of compelling contemporary artists.

So he goes around pasting illegal 20-foot high photographs on your house and says stuff like “You never know who’s part of the police and who’s not”. That is what JR does. Raising eyebrows and stretching smiles.