Hip-hop culture takes on the art market

About the exhibition "Hip-hop 360 - Gloire à l'art de rue" (Hip-hop 360 - Glory to street art) which runs until 24 July at the Philharmonie de Paris.

Because it is disrupting contemporary creation, a major exhibition is devoted to the hip-hop movement at the Philharmonie de Paris. In fact, the March issue of Beaux-Arts Magazine had such a hard time choosing between the wave of Finnish painters and hip-hop's assault on museums and luxury for its front page photo that it did one of each!

It's not often that an artistic movement remains so faithful to its origins when the sirens of success are sounding. Yet this is the case with hip-hop, which finds itself at the heart of the art market and the world of luxury without leaving the working class neighbourhoods. Paintings by Rammellzee, Phase 2, Fab 5 Freddy or Futura 2000 remind us at the beginning of the exhibition that this energy was imported to Paris in 1982 with the New York City Rap Tour. Vinyls, clothes, archives, objects, collections and paintings follow one another to highlight the faces, rhythms and styles that forged the birth of hip-hop in France. Rappers have become the muse of luxury brands and have encouraged the purchase of contemporary works of art.

While recognising the need to take a new step in the recognition of this culture, which is now inescapable, Hugo Vitrani nonetheless regrets in Beaux-Arts Magazine a harmless scenography that is a little overplayed and fetishistic, locking itself into a certain folklore and perhaps neglecting its political roots and its artistic impact.