We are experiencing the most important art movement of our time. It is stretching across every industrialised city, allowing global communication to transcend every language, culture, class and ethnicity. As soon as you enter the city, you will be forced to pay attention to the artistic expressionism from a deeply politicised group of people, who are gracing the streets with their aesthetic values.

This public art celebrates freedom, encourages members of our society to use free speech and expressionism to convey important messages that are at times completely missing from our mediated world. We need to acknowledge and pay close attention to this phenomenal movement that can simply be defined as street art – a form of art that is painted, sprayed and stencilled directly on the streets. According to the Tate: “The term Street Art has come to define the more visual and engaging aspects of urban art as opposed to text-based graffiti and tagging”.

Before this artistic form has been sucked completely into the commercialised world of the auction houses and the galleries, we should appreciate the power of the movement. The importance of street art stems from the facts that it is one of the last ways in which people can make un-commercial public expression that represents our freedom. This way of life and cultural movement enables artists to have the chance to express their feelings and thoughts throughout the world in different environments. Street art has been in mainstream existence for more than 30 years and could be found in cities like Paris, New York and Sao Paulo. Artists like Goldie were painting huge pieces on trains in New York and Blek Le Rat was stencilling the streets of Paris. Mark from Auction Saboteur, a UK based website that allows collectors and artists the opportunity to buy and sell street artworks describes: “The most important decade of street art is the 1970’s when we saw the birth of graffiti and graffiti crews. Graffiti at this time became an organised affair where different people from different backgrounds came together for one cause – to write their name on a train”.

Street art has progressed and travelled a long way from those days when it was just considered vandalism. Artists have evolved the form into more thoughtful and depicting pieces that could be immediately understood when viewed. The art started to revitalise spaces, especially when areas had been deserted and left in dereliction. Today the mainstream is starting to appreciate the power of street art, most notably the Tate museum had a series of street art discussions and invited artists from around the world to display their artistic talents. If we take the time to look past the illegality of the work, one would be able to appreciate all of the creativity and limitless possibilities that street art actually has. Johann Haehling von Lanzenauer, a curator for Berliner Strasse from Germany states: “We promote Urban Art because we are interested in the contemporary, progressive and non-conformist approach of those artists”. The Berliner Strasse exhibition is currently being shown in Berlin until February 2009 and is an “attempt to examine the term street art from a broader perspective”.

A street artist creates a piece that beautifies our environment and makes it interesting again. They take the time present ideas, formulate the structure and create masterpieces for the public to stop and take it in. Most art nowadays is produce in elite art institutions, brought into private galleries for huge sums of money. One has to be invited into the space just to view the pieces, and then the work gets sold in auction houses for extreme amounts of cash. The art works are collected by people with money and stored or hung for their eyes only. Lastly the only time everyday people can view a work is when it has reached a public gallery and the whole process usually dates a work by 50 years. Street art allows people to appreciate the now, has the power to tackle the issues of today and makes it extremely relevant. Similarly Eddie Lock from eddielock.co.uk, an online urban art gallery explains why street art is exciting to him. “I love street art and have collected it for years. It’s a way of life for me and I represent many street artists”.

Not everyone is in agreement that street art is that important and should be described one of the greatest art movements of our time. Kevin Killeen, an academic from the University of York felt: “I’m not sure, the renaissance period in particular” is the most powerful art period in history, “and to compare a kind of art to a ‘period’ might be problematic”. For many people, street art is more than just a kind of art. There are so many different types and forms of street art, so to just limit the movement seems like an injustice. Steph Warren from Stella Dore Limited, a gallery based in Brick Lane, London has similar reservations: “In my view, street art is indeed a movement in it’s own right however I am uncomfortable with giving any contemporary movement the ‘greatest art period’ title until we are looking at it retrospectively and when we are in a position to compile and dissect all the attributes of the movement from the artists involved, their work, to the concepts behind street art”.

Maybe the time to analyse street art will come sooner than we think, the recent commercialisation of the movement has lead to an expansion of work being produced inside workshops and galleries that has no connection to the street. We should preserve the movement and recognise the skill, practice and sheer determination that artists have put into their work. Mark from Auction Saboteur tells us what street art can do. “Street art offers David the ability to shout as loud as Goliath. In a world where the most terrible acts of barbarism have been created by governments and big businesses, any opportunities to counter balance their ability to manipulate the world around their agenda, the better”. So let us embrace street art in its entirety and acknowledge the movement that we are living through before it has been lost.