Street Art and Graffiti in the Context of a City

The paper presents data from interviews conducted in 2006-2007 with four representatives of the Prague street art and graffiti scene who worked in the Czech capital city at the beginning of the 2000s. Part of the article deals with creative activities in the Prague subway where most of the interviewed authors created their works. The author thus offers the perspective of the authors of the Prague street art and graffiti scenes and presents their view of the (il) legal works of art from around ten years ago in the context of the current discourse in social sciences. Over the last twenty years, this discourse has evolved to such an extent that it now enables to see the phenomenon of urban public works of art as a phenomenon full of paradoxes. Graffiti and street art therefore cannot be interpreted only from the point of view of legality or the art of resistance. Their definition must remain sufficiently open, since certain ambivalence, contradiction and ghostliness are characteristic of it equally as of life in a modern global city that is inherently tied to it.