Art in museums is carefully preserved and, if necessary, restored in order to be kept for centuries to come. Street art, by contrast, lasts for only a fraction of that time. Ephemerality is in fact one of its defining features; most of the street art ever produced is long gone. Nevertheless, some street art may be around for years. This holds true particularly for murals, although murals fall into a category of their own. Depending on the materials used, the location, the degree of exposure to the elements, possible alterations by fellow artists or passers-by, the level of inconvenience experienced by property owners or, for example, the quick turnaround of municipal cleaners, other (uncommissioned) works of art outdoors may be in existence only for as long as a number of months, weeks, days, or hours. Or even shorter still.

A mere five minutes may well be the most dismal record for the shortest lifespan of any street art work. That was literally the amount of time a life-size and hand-drawn paste up depicting AS Roma legend Francesco Totti was up for in a tunnel in Amsterdam, one day in November 2017. Street art crew Kamp Seedorf had hardly glued the paper onto the wall when out of nowhere a blue van appeared, parking on the pavement right next to their piece. Out stepped a hooded man who grabbed a pressure washer and resolutely erased many hours of studio work in a matter of seconds. Never mind the artists stood by watching in disbelief. ‘How is that even possible!??’, they would later lament on their social media accounts, prompting a great many indignant reactions in a show of support.

With the exception of the phantom outlines of artworks that once occupied a surface, or for that matter, a buffed wall that has inadvertently become a new artwork in its own right, there is normally nothing left to see once a work of street art has been removed. This is different at the intermediate stage where a piece of street art is crumbling or disfigured. Although it is still there, you can no longer enjoy seeing it in its original, intended state. A disintegrating work of art outdoors should still merit our attention, if only because its transience often comes with an aesthetic value of its own. There is beauty in decay.

In essence, the inevitable and wholly unpredictable process of decay begins as soon as the artist is done putting the finishing touches to their creation. This implies that the photography of unsanctioned art in the streets is basically the documentation of decomposition. A street art work will look (slightly) different each time it is caught on camera. In light of this, Ulrich Blanché (2018: 25) has noted that ‘every photograph of a street art work is both the work itself and an individual interpretation of the work’.

While in many places, street art is still deemed vandalism and is therefore removed, illegal street art pieces by popular artists are increasingly marked from on high as being of artistic or cultural value, and measures are taken for them not to be lost⁠¹ – or, exceptionally⁠², to get restored⁠³. However, dealing with street art as if it were heritage in the traditional sense of the word raises a number of issues, as Hansen (2017) and Nomeikaite (2018) have pointed out, amongst others. Although perhaps well-intentioned, installing (acrylic) glass panels⁠⁴ in front of art on a wall as a means of protecting and preserving it, flies in the face of what the movement stands for, notably the right to the city, the right to the surface (Andron, 2019), and thus the right to experience the urban environment⁠⁵.

By comparison, few people will disagree that preservation efforts are ill-intentioned if they are meant solely to result in financial gain. On multiple occasions, Banksy’s creations have been stolen from local communities with the express purpose of putting them up for auction⁠⁶. By appropriating street art in such a way, it is essentially being privatised, commodified, and given elite status. And that is regardless of the fact that traditionally, much street art has been site-specific, which entails that a piece maintains its artistic meaning only so long as it is kept in its original environment. In this sense, moving such works away from where they were installed inevitably means inflicting harm upon them, which in turn actually makes ex situ preservation a self-defeating procedure.

When it comes to (the preservation of) cultural heritage in relation to street art, it is not about objects from the past with a defined value and significance. Instead, it is about personal and collective experiences in the present – about the emotions generated by works of art as part of their surroundings. As the appearance of unsanctioned artworks are altered by the traces of time, this type of ‘living heritage’ is subject to continuous change. Put differently, interactions with such works are intangible occurrences which run their natural course, and which can, at best, be preserved as memories.

While documenting street art photographically may certainly help to keep those memories alive, photographs are unlikely to reproduce the emotions that are experienced at a particular moment in situ. As for the photographs in this essay – they primarily serve to put an underexposed side of the movement centre stage, as every single street art piece depicted here is in a state of visible degradation.

Apart from academic articles, not much attention appears to go out to street art’s fleeting nature. Nearly all books, websites, and social media pages dedicated to the genre tend to give a distorted picture of what is there to be seen, showing mostly works of art that are fully intact, immediately after their production. Images of artistic expressions in the streets that are flaking off, fading, or are marred in other ways, seem to be considered less fit to print or to be shared online. In short, they are insufficiently Instagrammable⁠⁷.

This essay goes against this trend by highlighting street art that may be losing its fight against evanescence, but that can readily be found in most places in the world and has just as much right to exist as those brand-new paste ups, stickers, stencils, and tiles which – for the time being – are still in their prime.