Meme wars: Lush, Hillary Clinton and graffiti on Instagram
The suspension of Lush’s Instagram account makes visible some serious issues about the governance of Instagram and the place of art-making on privately-owned digital platforms.
15 Aug 2016 12:00
Lachlan MacDowall
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Visual Arts
Just weeks after the destruction of another original Banksy stencil in Melbourne caused a stir, Australia’s own Banksy – the Melbourne street art Lush – became embroiled in his own controversy.
Lush collaborated with Banksy in his recent Dismaland Theme Park project. Like Banksy, he is a graffiti writer turned street artist who engages in very public pranks and hoaxes while carefully protecting his anonymity.
Dr Lachlan MacDowall is an artist and cultural researcher in the Centre for Cultural Partnerships in the Faculty of the VCA and MCM, University of Melbourne. His areas of research include the history and aesthetics of graffiti, the creative city and community-based art-making.
He has published widely on graffiti, street art and urban creativity, including as a contributor to the two book-length studies of Australian graffiti: Cubrilo, Harvey and Stamer’s King’s Way: The Beginnings of Australian Graffiti: Melbourne 1983-1993 (2009) and Christine Dew’s Uncommissioned Art (2007), which includes 60 of his photographs.
He is also the Principal Researcher on a three-year ARC-funded project examining the effective evaluation of community-based arts projects, in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts and RMIT University.
