The burgeoning literature on street art and graffiti tends to have a broader focus on a range of... more The burgeoning literature on street art and graffiti tends to have a broader focus on a range of works in a particular area or on the works of a particular street artist. Seldom do scholars engage in detailed interpretation, or sustained analysis of the reception of a particular work of street art.1 Fiona Hillary and Shanti Sumartojo are to be commended in presenting a rare example of a detailed analysis of a particular work of street art, and its place-based reception.2 However, while their article represents a promising sea change in terms of a clear shift in the focus of analysis in the literature, Hillary and Sumartojo’s study of Adrian Doyle’s Empty Nursery Blue is compromised by several factors, not least among which is the largely unacknowledged and unexamined investment and involvement of the authors as the commissioners and curators of the work. Further, Hillary and Sumartojo’s uncritical adoption of the concept of affective atmosphere paradoxically operates to exclude contradictory responses to the work, as it cannot take account of the detailed particularities of viewers’ social-emotional experiences. In addition, while the authors’ self-described autoethnographic methods are laudable, in practice this seems to bear little resemblance to the established and critically reflexive practice of autoethnography as it is enacted in the social and human sciences and indeed, this “autoethnography” appears to operate as a rhetorical device that enables the authorial animation of key concepts from the literature (e.g., political theorist Jane Bennett’s notion of “enchantment”) central to the authors’ interpretation of Empty Nursery Blue. It is argued that the liminal status of Empty Nursery Blue as apparently uncommissioned street art and as commissioned public art presents an unacknowledged yet potentially productive analytic tension at the heart of Hillary and Sumartojo’s interpretation.
This paper examines graffiti as an object that has historically confounded stylistic or formal an... more This paper examines graffiti as an object that has historically confounded stylistic or formal analysis proper, although elements of this deviant form of mark making have been appropriated as expressive resources within the recognisable styles of modern and contemporary art. Critiques of the concept of style are now well established and this formerly dominant method of approaching the analysis of art historical objects has largely fallen out of favour in current scholarship. Beyond rehearsing these familiar critical points, it will be argued that a consideration of the limitations of this foundational disciplinary concept may be a paradoxically productive exercise if an approach is taken that examines the boundaries, or limits, to the kinds of objects and images to which the concept of style has been applied. It will be argued that a number of historically liminal categories of person – children; primitives; the mentally ill; and criminals – inform the genealogy of perception of the contemporary liminal 'styles' of graffiti, post-‐graffiti and street art; and that these limit cases, rather than being marginalised exclusions not worthy of analytic attention, are generative of the very coherence of the notion of style. Following Rancière, it is argued that contemporary applications of the concept of style may lie in attending to the contingency and primacy of the processes of perception itself, an essential component of seminal approaches to style (e.g., Wölfflin, 1915) in determining our practices of looking.
This paper examines the dialogue and transformation of public space that occurred after Banksy’s ... more This paper examines the dialogue and transformation of public space that occurred after Banksy’s Slave Labour was removed without notice from a wall in North London, transported to Miami and listed for auction. Despite the high-profile media coverage of the ‘theft’ of Banksy’s piece, the explosion of new works provoked by its extraction was for the most part simply erased as they appeared. We argue that the excision of Slave Labour provided a ‘gap in the sensible’ (Rancie`re 2004) and the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a lively local intertextual visual dialogue, which transformed this otherwise apparently unremarkable London side street into an arena for aesthetic protest and critical social commentary.
The removal of street art from community walls for private auction is a morally problematic yet l... more The removal of street art from community walls for private auction is a morally problematic yet legal action. This paper examines community reactions to the removal of Banksy’s No Ball Games for private auction. Five hundred unique reader comments on online newspaper articles reporting this controversial event were collected and analyzed. An emerging set of urban moral codes was used to position street art as a valuable community asset rather than as an index of crime and social decay. The latter discourse informed a repertoire that depicted No Ball Games as unlawful graffiti that was rightfully removed. Here, the operations of ‘the police’ (Rancière, 1999) in the distribution of the sensible are evident in the assertions that validate and depoliticize the removal of No Ball Games. This repertoire was used to attribute responsibility for the work’s removal to deterministic external forces, while reducing the accountability attributable to those responsible for the removal of the work. A contrasting anti-removal repertoire depicted street art as a gift to the community, and its removal as a form of theft and a source of harm to the community. The pro-removal repertoire incorporates and depoliticizes elements of the anti-removal repertoire, by acknowledging the moral wrong of the removal, but yielding to the legal rights of the wall owners to sell the work; and by recognizing the status of street art as valuable, but asserting that the proper place for art is a museum. The anti-removal repertoire counters elements of the pro- removal repertoire, by acknowledging the illegality of street art, but containing this to the initial act of making unsanctioned marks on a wall, after which point the work becomes the property of the community it is located within. This analysis reveals an emergent set of urban moral codes that positions a currently legal action as a form of criminal activity.
This working paper advocates a methodological approach to the study of street art and graffiti th... more This working paper advocates a methodological approach to the study of street art and graffiti that is based on the documentation of single sites over time. Longitudinal photo-documentation is a form of data collection that allows street art and graffiti to be examined as visual dialogue. By capturing everyday forms of public mark making alongside both more recognizably ‘artistic’ images, and more visually ‘offensive’ tags, we aim to attend to graffiti and street art’s existence within a field of social interaction. We describe a relevant analytic tool drawn from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis – the next turn proof procedure – which may be adapted in order to study street art and graffiti as a form of asynchronous, yet sequential, communication. This form of analysis departs from existent forms of analysis in that it is not concerned with the semiotics or iconography of decontextualized individual photographs of street art or graffiti. We present a worked analytic example to demonstrate the utility of longitudinal photo-documentation in making visible the dialogue amongst artists, writers and community members, and we employ the principles of the next turn proof procedure to illustrate the ways in which each party shows their understanding of the prior work on the wall via their own contribution to the ‘conversation.’
Energy is the capacity of a physical system to perform work – this is the simplest definition of ... more Energy is the capacity of a physical system to perform work – this is the simplest definition of energy. Energy as a physical quantity is manifested in many forms – as heat, kinetic, mechanical, and chemical energy, or potential energy. In this book, metaphorically referring to the concept of energy, we wish to point out that it is also possible to talk about aesthetic energy and that this concept is very useful in the discussion on the subject of the city. This energy in the context of the city can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, a given place with its own aesthetic nature has its own potential of energy. After all, the city physically, with its space, landscapes, architecture and art, is an object of permanent aesthetic experience. Can this potential be transformed into work? These aesthetic experiences make people abandon certain places and admire others; some cities fall, while others grow. The aesthetic object – and it should be noted that among aesthetic qualities we experience not only beauty or harmony, but also the sublime, tragedy, ugliness and kitsch – in itself, affecting its recipients, may become a source of specific exploitative but also creative activities. The other meaning in which aesthetic energy is understood is related to revealing the aesthetic aspect of human activities. Are we not willing to perform some work in order to save the aesthetic experience or participate in it? It is not difficult to note that the movement of this energy in favourable conditions takes place in a circle: the energy of places affects people's behaviour and people create places full of energy. Lodz is an interesting example of flows of aesthetic energy, it can be said that the city is inherently related to energy. Lodz was established in the 19th century and within just a few decades it transformed from a village of only 939 inhabitants (1827) to the thriving city of textile industry (314,000 inhabitants in 1900), acquiring aesthetic landscape of the city unique in the country, compared to Manchester or Lyon: brick factories, chimneys, workers' settlements, eclectic tenement houses and villa-style residences of industrialists. The sudden collapse of the industry caused a general decline of the city in the 1990s. In the present time, a huge effort has been made to revitalise the city. Appreciating the value of the places that have lost their functionality, the possibility of the city's development is seen in connection with culture and science. Its dormant energy is sought in the ethos of "industrial Lodz", but not in energy of machines driven first by water, then steam and finally electricity, but in its architecture, space, and most of all in the people who – moved by the history of the city and its post-industrial face – are willing to work for its sake. The symbol of this transformation is the currently revitalised EC1 power plant whose Art Nouveau buildings were put into operation in 1907 (photo 1). In the past, the place used to provide electricity to the entire city and it worked until 2001. Today, as part of a complex covering 90 ha, it becomes the New Centre of Lodz. Whether the concept of seeking energy in that which is aesthetic is appropriate will be soon shown based on this particular example. Therefore, the reader should be forewarned that we will often refer to this particular city in the book. We ask representatives of various specialisations about the possibility of obtaining and maintaining aesthetic energy, therefore different research perspectives and seemingly distant objects of research – from architecture and urban space through street art and parkour to aesthetic theories – appear in individual chapters. The reflections of our authors always revolve around the aesthetic object or the aesthetically experiencing entity. Thus, we begin with great ideas of urban and aesthetic theories, which found their practical solutions in European cities (A. Remesar), and at the same time we show, based on specific examples, what kind of energy can be hidden in unfinished or even bankrupt ideas (S. Stamatovic Vuckovic, W. Kazimierska-Jerzyk). Aware of the aesthetic potential of art, we point to its effects in urban space (A. Gralińska-Toborek, S. Hansen/D. Flynn). We write about all users of the city, great visionaries and anonymous inhabitants, though additional attention is paid to the tourist (J. Mokras-Grabowska) and traceur (J. Petri). We see them as curiously contradictory entities experiencing the city aesthetically: the first one is subjected to a public offer of the city, while the other one privatises the city through experience, exceeding the established barriers of this experience. We also show how complex a challenge it is to attempt to separate that which is public from that which is private in our experience (E. Chudoba). We finish the book with statements made by practitioners – culture organisers from non-governmental organisations who use art to transfer energy to people and recover aesthetic energy of places (H. Bensaïd, J. Mróz). These kind of manifestos also illustrate the circulation of aesthetic energy: private organisations protect public/social values, draw attention to the condition of public places and recover these places for the individual, personal aesthetic experience. We still owe the reader an explanation. Instead of talking in more detail about the content of the book, each chapter is preceded by a graphic commentary and an illustration of its content. We have been inspired to do so by Antoni Remesar, who by means of a graph sums up his reflections on urban decorum. Therefore, we have decided to visualise, with the use of overlapping circles, the network of relationships that make up the issues addressed in the texts, as well as the perspectives from which they are observed. Yellow marks strictly urban issues – places and spaces (we indicate the names of the cities mentioned in the text); red – art contexts; blue – issues related to aesthetic experience; green – complex issues (sociological, political, economic) that are not dominated by a particular discourse. The concepts included in the circles are not keywords provided by the authors, but rather the terms which, according to the editors, describe the content and relate its meaning to the context of aesthetic issues. They are often contradictory terms, as energy is also released through the action of conflicting forces. We hope that as a result of our own, mutually corresponding, though sometimes polemical positions, we will give birth to work that will be directed towards the aesthetic development of cities and the improvement of the quality of our experience.
The burgeoning literature on street art and graffiti tends to have a broader focus on a range of... more The burgeoning literature on street art and graffiti tends to have a broader focus on a range of works in a particular area or on the works of a particular street artist. Seldom do scholars engage in detailed interpretation, or sustained analysis of the reception of a particular work of street art.1 Fiona Hillary and Shanti Sumartojo are to be commended in presenting a rare example of a detailed analysis of a particular work of street art, and its place-based reception.2 However, while their article represents a promising sea change in terms of a clear shift in the focus of analysis in the literature, Hillary and Sumartojo’s study of Adrian Doyle’s Empty Nursery Blue is compromised by several factors, not least among which is the largely unacknowledged and unexamined investment and involvement of the authors as the commissioners and curators of the work. Further, Hillary and Sumartojo’s uncritical adoption of the concept of affective atmosphere paradoxically operates to exclude contradictory responses to the work, as it cannot take account of the detailed particularities of viewers’ social-emotional experiences. In addition, while the authors’ self-described autoethnographic methods are laudable, in practice this seems to bear little resemblance to the established and critically reflexive practice of autoethnography as it is enacted in the social and human sciences and indeed, this “autoethnography” appears to operate as a rhetorical device that enables the authorial animation of key concepts from the literature (e.g., political theorist Jane Bennett’s notion of “enchantment”) central to the authors’ interpretation of Empty Nursery Blue. It is argued that the liminal status of Empty Nursery Blue as apparently uncommissioned street art and as commissioned public art presents an unacknowledged yet potentially productive analytic tension at the heart of Hillary and Sumartojo’s interpretation.
This paper examines graffiti as an object that has historically confounded stylistic or formal an... more This paper examines graffiti as an object that has historically confounded stylistic or formal analysis proper, although elements of this deviant form of mark making have been appropriated as expressive resources within the recognisable styles of modern and contemporary art. Critiques of the concept of style are now well established and this formerly dominant method of approaching the analysis of art historical objects has largely fallen out of favour in current scholarship. Beyond rehearsing these familiar critical points, it will be argued that a consideration of the limitations of this foundational disciplinary concept may be a paradoxically productive exercise if an approach is taken that examines the boundaries, or limits, to the kinds of objects and images to which the concept of style has been applied. It will be argued that a number of historically liminal categories of person – children; primitives; the mentally ill; and criminals – inform the genealogy of perception of the contemporary liminal 'styles' of graffiti, post-‐graffiti and street art; and that these limit cases, rather than being marginalised exclusions not worthy of analytic attention, are generative of the very coherence of the notion of style. Following Rancière, it is argued that contemporary applications of the concept of style may lie in attending to the contingency and primacy of the processes of perception itself, an essential component of seminal approaches to style (e.g., Wölfflin, 1915) in determining our practices of looking.
This paper examines the dialogue and transformation of public space that occurred after Banksy’s ... more This paper examines the dialogue and transformation of public space that occurred after Banksy’s Slave Labour was removed without notice from a wall in North London, transported to Miami and listed for auction. Despite the high-profile media coverage of the ‘theft’ of Banksy’s piece, the explosion of new works provoked by its extraction was for the most part simply erased as they appeared. We argue that the excision of Slave Labour provided a ‘gap in the sensible’ (Rancie`re 2004) and the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a lively local intertextual visual dialogue, which transformed this otherwise apparently unremarkable London side street into an arena for aesthetic protest and critical social commentary.
The removal of street art from community walls for private auction is a morally problematic yet l... more The removal of street art from community walls for private auction is a morally problematic yet legal action. This paper examines community reactions to the removal of Banksy’s No Ball Games for private auction. Five hundred unique reader comments on online newspaper articles reporting this controversial event were collected and analyzed. An emerging set of urban moral codes was used to position street art as a valuable community asset rather than as an index of crime and social decay. The latter discourse informed a repertoire that depicted No Ball Games as unlawful graffiti that was rightfully removed. Here, the operations of ‘the police’ (Rancière, 1999) in the distribution of the sensible are evident in the assertions that validate and depoliticize the removal of No Ball Games. This repertoire was used to attribute responsibility for the work’s removal to deterministic external forces, while reducing the accountability attributable to those responsible for the removal of the work. A contrasting anti-removal repertoire depicted street art as a gift to the community, and its removal as a form of theft and a source of harm to the community. The pro-removal repertoire incorporates and depoliticizes elements of the anti-removal repertoire, by acknowledging the moral wrong of the removal, but yielding to the legal rights of the wall owners to sell the work; and by recognizing the status of street art as valuable, but asserting that the proper place for art is a museum. The anti-removal repertoire counters elements of the pro- removal repertoire, by acknowledging the illegality of street art, but containing this to the initial act of making unsanctioned marks on a wall, after which point the work becomes the property of the community it is located within. This analysis reveals an emergent set of urban moral codes that positions a currently legal action as a form of criminal activity.
This working paper advocates a methodological approach to the study of street art and graffiti th... more This working paper advocates a methodological approach to the study of street art and graffiti that is based on the documentation of single sites over time. Longitudinal photo-documentation is a form of data collection that allows street art and graffiti to be examined as visual dialogue. By capturing everyday forms of public mark making alongside both more recognizably ‘artistic’ images, and more visually ‘offensive’ tags, we aim to attend to graffiti and street art’s existence within a field of social interaction. We describe a relevant analytic tool drawn from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis – the next turn proof procedure – which may be adapted in order to study street art and graffiti as a form of asynchronous, yet sequential, communication. This form of analysis departs from existent forms of analysis in that it is not concerned with the semiotics or iconography of decontextualized individual photographs of street art or graffiti. We present a worked analytic example to demonstrate the utility of longitudinal photo-documentation in making visible the dialogue amongst artists, writers and community members, and we employ the principles of the next turn proof procedure to illustrate the ways in which each party shows their understanding of the prior work on the wall via their own contribution to the ‘conversation.’
Energy is the capacity of a physical system to perform work – this is the simplest definition of ... more Energy is the capacity of a physical system to perform work – this is the simplest definition of energy. Energy as a physical quantity is manifested in many forms – as heat, kinetic, mechanical, and chemical energy, or potential energy. In this book, metaphorically referring to the concept of energy, we wish to point out that it is also possible to talk about aesthetic energy and that this concept is very useful in the discussion on the subject of the city. This energy in the context of the city can be understood in two ways. On the one hand, a given place with its own aesthetic nature has its own potential of energy. After all, the city physically, with its space, landscapes, architecture and art, is an object of permanent aesthetic experience. Can this potential be transformed into work? These aesthetic experiences make people abandon certain places and admire others; some cities fall, while others grow. The aesthetic object – and it should be noted that among aesthetic qualities we experience not only beauty or harmony, but also the sublime, tragedy, ugliness and kitsch – in itself, affecting its recipients, may become a source of specific exploitative but also creative activities. The other meaning in which aesthetic energy is understood is related to revealing the aesthetic aspect of human activities. Are we not willing to perform some work in order to save the aesthetic experience or participate in it? It is not difficult to note that the movement of this energy in favourable conditions takes place in a circle: the energy of places affects people's behaviour and people create places full of energy. Lodz is an interesting example of flows of aesthetic energy, it can be said that the city is inherently related to energy. Lodz was established in the 19th century and within just a few decades it transformed from a village of only 939 inhabitants (1827) to the thriving city of textile industry (314,000 inhabitants in 1900), acquiring aesthetic landscape of the city unique in the country, compared to Manchester or Lyon: brick factories, chimneys, workers' settlements, eclectic tenement houses and villa-style residences of industrialists. The sudden collapse of the industry caused a general decline of the city in the 1990s. In the present time, a huge effort has been made to revitalise the city. Appreciating the value of the places that have lost their functionality, the possibility of the city's development is seen in connection with culture and science. Its dormant energy is sought in the ethos of "industrial Lodz", but not in energy of machines driven first by water, then steam and finally electricity, but in its architecture, space, and most of all in the people who – moved by the history of the city and its post-industrial face – are willing to work for its sake. The symbol of this transformation is the currently revitalised EC1 power plant whose Art Nouveau buildings were put into operation in 1907 (photo 1). In the past, the place used to provide electricity to the entire city and it worked until 2001. Today, as part of a complex covering 90 ha, it becomes the New Centre of Lodz. Whether the concept of seeking energy in that which is aesthetic is appropriate will be soon shown based on this particular example. Therefore, the reader should be forewarned that we will often refer to this particular city in the book. We ask representatives of various specialisations about the possibility of obtaining and maintaining aesthetic energy, therefore different research perspectives and seemingly distant objects of research – from architecture and urban space through street art and parkour to aesthetic theories – appear in individual chapters. The reflections of our authors always revolve around the aesthetic object or the aesthetically experiencing entity. Thus, we begin with great ideas of urban and aesthetic theories, which found their practical solutions in European cities (A. Remesar), and at the same time we show, based on specific examples, what kind of energy can be hidden in unfinished or even bankrupt ideas (S. Stamatovic Vuckovic, W. Kazimierska-Jerzyk). Aware of the aesthetic potential of art, we point to its effects in urban space (A. Gralińska-Toborek, S. Hansen/D. Flynn). We write about all users of the city, great visionaries and anonymous inhabitants, though additional attention is paid to the tourist (J. Mokras-Grabowska) and traceur (J. Petri). We see them as curiously contradictory entities experiencing the city aesthetically: the first one is subjected to a public offer of the city, while the other one privatises the city through experience, exceeding the established barriers of this experience. We also show how complex a challenge it is to attempt to separate that which is public from that which is private in our experience (E. Chudoba). We finish the book with statements made by practitioners – culture organisers from non-governmental organisations who use art to transfer energy to people and recover aesthetic energy of places (H. Bensaïd, J. Mróz). These kind of manifestos also illustrate the circulation of aesthetic energy: private organisations protect public/social values, draw attention to the condition of public places and recover these places for the individual, personal aesthetic experience. We still owe the reader an explanation. Instead of talking in more detail about the content of the book, each chapter is preceded by a graphic commentary and an illustration of its content. We have been inspired to do so by Antoni Remesar, who by means of a graph sums up his reflections on urban decorum. Therefore, we have decided to visualise, with the use of overlapping circles, the network of relationships that make up the issues addressed in the texts, as well as the perspectives from which they are observed. Yellow marks strictly urban issues – places and spaces (we indicate the names of the cities mentioned in the text); red – art contexts; blue – issues related to aesthetic experience; green – complex issues (sociological, political, economic) that are not dominated by a particular discourse. The concepts included in the circles are not keywords provided by the authors, but rather the terms which, according to the editors, describe the content and relate its meaning to the context of aesthetic issues. They are often contradictory terms, as energy is also released through the action of conflicting forces. We hope that as a result of our own, mutually corresponding, though sometimes polemical positions, we will give birth to work that will be directed towards the aesthetic development of cities and the improvement of the quality of our experience.
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of the ‘theft’ of Banksy’s piece, the explosion of new works provoked by its extraction was for the most part simply erased as they appeared. We argue that the excision of Slave Labour provided a ‘gap in the sensible’ (Rancie`re 2004) and the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a lively local intertextual visual dialogue, which transformed this otherwise apparently unremarkable London side street into an arena for aesthetic protest and critical social commentary.
We ask representatives of various specialisations about the possibility of obtaining and maintaining aesthetic energy, therefore different research perspectives and seemingly distant objects of research – from architecture and urban space through street art and parkour to aesthetic theories – appear in individual chapters. The reflections of our authors always revolve around the aesthetic object or the aesthetically experiencing entity. Thus, we begin with great ideas of urban and aesthetic theories, which found their practical solutions in European cities (A. Remesar), and at the same time we show, based on specific examples, what kind of energy can be hidden in unfinished or even bankrupt ideas (S. Stamatovic Vuckovic, W. Kazimierska-Jerzyk). Aware of the aesthetic potential of art, we point to its effects in urban space (A. Gralińska-Toborek, S. Hansen/D. Flynn). We write about all users of the city, great visionaries and anonymous inhabitants, though additional attention is paid to the tourist (J. Mokras-Grabowska) and traceur (J. Petri). We see them as curiously contradictory entities experiencing the city aesthetically: the first one is subjected to a public offer of the city, while the other one privatises the city through experience, exceeding the established barriers of this experience. We also show how complex a challenge it is to attempt to separate that which is public from that which is private in our experience (E. Chudoba). We finish the book with statements made by practitioners – culture organisers from non-governmental organisations who use art to transfer energy to people and recover aesthetic energy of places (H. Bensaïd, J. Mróz). These kind of manifestos also illustrate the circulation of aesthetic energy: private organisations protect public/social values, draw attention to the condition of public places and recover these places for the individual, personal aesthetic experience.
We still owe the reader an explanation. Instead of talking in more detail about the content of the book, each chapter is preceded by a graphic commentary and an illustration of its content. We have been inspired to do so by Antoni Remesar, who by means of a graph sums up his reflections on urban decorum. Therefore, we have decided to visualise, with the use of overlapping circles, the network of relationships that make up the issues addressed in the texts, as well as the perspectives from which they are observed. Yellow marks strictly urban issues – places and spaces (we indicate the names of the cities mentioned in the text); red – art contexts; blue – issues related to aesthetic experience; green – complex issues (sociological, political, economic) that are not dominated by a particular discourse. The concepts included in the circles are not keywords provided by the authors, but rather the terms which, according to the editors, describe the content and relate its meaning to the context of aesthetic issues. They are often contradictory terms, as energy is also released through the action of conflicting forces. We hope that as a result of our own, mutually corresponding, though sometimes polemical positions, we will give birth to work that will be directed towards the aesthetic development of cities and the improvement of the quality of our experience.
of the ‘theft’ of Banksy’s piece, the explosion of new works provoked by its extraction was for the most part simply erased as they appeared. We argue that the excision of Slave Labour provided a ‘gap in the sensible’ (Rancie`re 2004) and the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a lively local intertextual visual dialogue, which transformed this otherwise apparently unremarkable London side street into an arena for aesthetic protest and critical social commentary.
We ask representatives of various specialisations about the possibility of obtaining and maintaining aesthetic energy, therefore different research perspectives and seemingly distant objects of research – from architecture and urban space through street art and parkour to aesthetic theories – appear in individual chapters. The reflections of our authors always revolve around the aesthetic object or the aesthetically experiencing entity. Thus, we begin with great ideas of urban and aesthetic theories, which found their practical solutions in European cities (A. Remesar), and at the same time we show, based on specific examples, what kind of energy can be hidden in unfinished or even bankrupt ideas (S. Stamatovic Vuckovic, W. Kazimierska-Jerzyk). Aware of the aesthetic potential of art, we point to its effects in urban space (A. Gralińska-Toborek, S. Hansen/D. Flynn). We write about all users of the city, great visionaries and anonymous inhabitants, though additional attention is paid to the tourist (J. Mokras-Grabowska) and traceur (J. Petri). We see them as curiously contradictory entities experiencing the city aesthetically: the first one is subjected to a public offer of the city, while the other one privatises the city through experience, exceeding the established barriers of this experience. We also show how complex a challenge it is to attempt to separate that which is public from that which is private in our experience (E. Chudoba). We finish the book with statements made by practitioners – culture organisers from non-governmental organisations who use art to transfer energy to people and recover aesthetic energy of places (H. Bensaïd, J. Mróz). These kind of manifestos also illustrate the circulation of aesthetic energy: private organisations protect public/social values, draw attention to the condition of public places and recover these places for the individual, personal aesthetic experience.
We still owe the reader an explanation. Instead of talking in more detail about the content of the book, each chapter is preceded by a graphic commentary and an illustration of its content. We have been inspired to do so by Antoni Remesar, who by means of a graph sums up his reflections on urban decorum. Therefore, we have decided to visualise, with the use of overlapping circles, the network of relationships that make up the issues addressed in the texts, as well as the perspectives from which they are observed. Yellow marks strictly urban issues – places and spaces (we indicate the names of the cities mentioned in the text); red – art contexts; blue – issues related to aesthetic experience; green – complex issues (sociological, political, economic) that are not dominated by a particular discourse. The concepts included in the circles are not keywords provided by the authors, but rather the terms which, according to the editors, describe the content and relate its meaning to the context of aesthetic issues. They are often contradictory terms, as energy is also released through the action of conflicting forces. We hope that as a result of our own, mutually corresponding, though sometimes polemical positions, we will give birth to work that will be directed towards the aesthetic development of cities and the improvement of the quality of our experience.