A Clean City or a Grey City?

I was in Portuguese class when my teacher showed us a documentary named “Cidade Cinza”, which translates to “Grey City”. My teacher has been teaching us what is considered art and why it is considered art. Since the first day of school two weeks ago, he has been making us debate and rethink our decisions of what art is. The official definition of the word art is:

The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

So why is it important to actually know what art means for this? Because currently in São Paulo there’s a discussion between is graffiti an art or a violation of the public laws. A part of the population thinks that it’s a way for people who don’t have voices to communicate what their feeling and the other side of the discussion thinks that the walls are meant to be “clean”.

The side of the population that thinks that the walls are meant to be clean; also think that more spaces like the Wynwood Walls in Miami, Florida should be created in São Paulo so the rest of the streets are clean. But the people who think like that can be a little ignorant because a few decades ago streets weren’t just means of transportation but they were also socializing spots where teenagers would just hang out. But nowadays with insecurity, the Brazilian elite just goes to the streets in their cars to go to work, home, dinner but nobody plays soccer on the streets like kids used to some decades back.

Now that São Paulo has a new mayor named João Doria who is a fan of erasing people’s art every day my city starts getting grayer and grayer some people might think it’s a clean city but have you ever seen an aerial picture of São Paulo I doubt it. The new mayor has paid money to outsourced companies for them to go around São Paolo deleting every piece of wall art they see. And of course that caused revolt because he also deleted a beautiful mural that had fifteen thousand square meters in the Avenida 23 de Maio he claimed that the painting was already old and aged. But anyway it created a series of protests to happen, social media was on fire and all of the media companies were anxious to hear both parts sides of the story. So the question I leave you to debate is:

Is a beautiful city a grey city?