I was looking forward to this one, but as is often the case when the reviews are suspiciously too good, I found what is described as Bangkok’s creative centre underwhelming. OK, hot sticky day, and walking around looking for these gems of street art, I could have been mistaken for a participant in a wet t-shirt competition. There’s also the fact that my counterculture yardsticks are places such as the old industrial area of East Berlin. Few places in the world carry that same historical and cultural weight, and I suppose I should have lowered my expectations.
The area itself is interesting, and down some narrow alleyways, you find remnants of its past as a ghetto, and everywhere, locals engage in the daily struggle to make a living. Murals? They probably see them as ugly paintings that, at best, create jobs in cafes and restaurants.
Another thing that bothers me today is that much so-called ‘street art’ is, in reality, murals commissioned by local authorities or corporations. Often, it could be in an area full of offices, in which case it is corporate branding, or local authorities wanting to attract tourists to an area where the hotels have low occupancy. I don’t know the academic history of street art, but I can guess that in some major Western city, a homeless kid found a marker, or maybe a can of paint, and wrote, “FUCK YOUZ ALL” on a wall at three in the morning. A human being invisible to mainstream society, using the only way available to him to force so-called decent citizens, like Epstein, to acknowledge he exists.