Meeting & Signing · Dico de l’Art urbain

What is a ‘blaze’? What does “back to back”, “whole car” or “top to bottom” mean? What’s the difference between “urban art”, “street art”, “graffiti” and “tag”? The vocabulary of urban art, a veritable artistic movement of our century, can sometimes seem obscure. Movements, techniques, disciplines, places, institutions… Quentin Gassiat has compiled 450 common nouns, adjectives, verbs and proper nouns in this first Dictionary of Urban Art.
You’ll now know that a bencher is a photographer who specialises in taking photos of graffiti on trains; that toyer is a highly unpopular practice that consists of vandalising a rival graffiti artist’s work by tagging it with the word “toy”, either because the artistic quality is considered mediocre, or out of sheer provocation; that 5pointz in New York was a former water meter factory made available to graffiti artists by the city so that they could perform there with impunity… From Acab (or Aerosol) to Zoo or (Zves), 450 definitions for all the terms used in urban art!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Quentin Gassiat is a French visual artist living and working in Paris. Alongside his own artistic practice, he has been developing documentary work for several years, meeting artists from all horizons to discuss their careers and their work.