Yesterday I made a brief appearance on the Channel 7 news after Lord Mayor Robert Doyle stirred up the media. It has been a while since multiple news crews were in Hosier Lane and it is a good opportunity to draw attention to one of Melbourne’s attractions. Both Channel 7 and Channel 10 sent crews to cover the story.
Lush in Hosier Lane
Lord Mayor Doyle was playing a similar game to Lush in stirring people up. Lush has been doing a bit of painting in Hosier Lane, poking fun at the scene and himself. Both Doyle and Lush want a reaction and don’t care if it is positive or negative or even if people point out that they are just trying to get a reaction.
Adrian Doyle was keen to promote Blender Lane over Hosier Lane because he manages Blender studio and the Dark Horse Experiment gallery right next door.
Is it all over for street art? I doubt it; I’ve heard that too many times to even be able to write that seriously. I remember Ghostpatrol saying that 2003 was the high point of Melbourne’s street art that was back in 2008 at a panel discussion at Famous When Dead. I’ve written about the end of street art before, considering the political interests involved in declaring Surrealism over.
The long tail is still play out but with population growth this might be sooner than expected. Earlier in the year the removal of love-locks from the Southgate bridges in Melbourne and the Pont de l’Archeveche Paris made the news. I first noticed a few love-locks when travelling in Europe in 2007 and eight years later their weight was becoming a concern to engineers.
The personal city of romantic strolls by the river is shared with so many other people with similar stories. There are now millions and billions of people and it is hard to get your head around those kind of numbers. The unimaginable mass of the population is such that a trend can become a structural engineering problem in crowd crushes and love locks. If it weren’t for the millions of people following in the footsteps of a few drunken Englishmen to see ancient Rome or Greece then it wouldn’t be a problem if the odd traveller scratched a name on the ancient stone ruins.
Yesterday morning Hosier Lane was not looking its best; there were a couple of fresh pieces and Lush’s piss takes. But writing about how Hosier Lane looking is like commenting on Melbourne’s weather, it is always changing.
GT Instagram spray can, Hosier Lane
Black Mark 