Re-Educating the Gaze: The Educational Power of Street Art

For years, my work has moved along two converging paths: on one hand, critical and theoretical research on Street Art as an aesthetic, legal, and political phenomenon; on the other, teaching younger generations, where I strive to make art not an abstract body of knowledge but a living experience embodied in everyday space. These two dimensions, which may seem distant, come together precisely in urban art. Street Art is not merely a visual language diffused throughout contemporary cities; it is a critical device that questions our ways of perceiving, inhabiting, and sharing public space.

In an era when our gaze is constantly solicited but rarely educated, I believe this form of art can assume a decisive pedagogical role. It does not simply decorate the city; it forces us to look differently, to renegotiate our position in relation to the city and its communities. In this sense, aesthetic education becomes both a philosophical and civic journey.

Since its origins, urban art has challenged the boundaries between what is legitimate and illegitimate, public and private, center and periphery. The urban wall is a field of tensions: it formally belongs to a specific subject and is regulated by legal norms, yet it is simultaneously traversed by collective gazes and continually reinterpreted through spontaneous practices. This liminal dimension is what makes it philosophically compelling.

As thinkers such as Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman have shown, the politics of art lies not only in its content but in the distribution of the sensible that is, in how what is visible and sayable is organized within social space. Urban art operates precisely on this threshold, making visible what is usually excluded and intervening in the interstices of the city to renegotiate perceptual and symbolic maps. The wall thus becomes, at once, an aesthetic support, a legal boundary, and a political surface.

We live immersed in a ceaseless flow of images, yet this overabundance does not automatically generate critical awareness. On the contrary, it risks anesthetizing perception. My students, like many young people today, inhabit spaces saturated with visual signs, both digital and physical, without being guided to read them, question them, or understand their symbolic scope.

Street Art, if approached with the right educational sensitivity, can become a true school of perception and citizenship. It serves as a tool for developing an “aesthetic citizenship”, the ability to actively participate in the symbolic construction of places, shaping our identities and relationships in the process.

This dimension cannot be separated from legal and political questions. In my book Street Art: Questioni giuridiche e diritto d’autore (Street Art: Legal Issues and Copyright), I explored how current legislation interacts with urban creativity, raising complex questions about ownership, copyright, preservation, and erasure. When addressed with students, these issues become powerful instruments of civic education, prompting them to ask: where is the boundary between artistic intervention and vandalism?

In this sense, urban art is a profoundly philosophical form of art not only because it raises questions, but because it does so within public space, involving the community. Aesthetic education grounded in Street Art does not aim merely to transmit artistic knowledge; it seeks to develop ways of existing within shared space.

The wall, and the urban environment more broadly, can thus be understood as a kind of public blackboard, on which collective narratives are written, erased, and rewritten continuously. Teaching students to read and act upon this blackboard means restoring to them the possibility of feeling like active participants in a broader discourse, both aesthetic and political.

To re-educate the gaze through Street Art is to restore depth to urban space, to rescue it from banality and indifference. It means recognizing that the city is not merely a functional container, but a living, layered organism, traversed by memories and aesthetic tensions.