CREDIT: GRIFFIN HARRINGTON AND MICHELLE FRANKS
Kevin Sabo, an LA-based street artists designs posters and plasters them on the sides of buildings.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw it, that it was like, on our side,” Republican TV and radio personality, Glenn Beck sputters out like an overgrown kid about to meet his favourite Power Ranger.

He’s introducing SABO, a Los Angeles- based street artist, who designs cloakand- dagger posters and plasters them on the sides of buildings. Only the buildings he’s plastering them on house what he’s defending: conservatism.

His band of scary men’s slogan is “The Right Kind of Rebels” and work “to be as dirty, ground level, and mean as any liberal artist out there, more so if [we] can. Use their tactics, their methods, appeal to their audience, the young, urban, street urchins with a message they never hear in a style they own.”

But that's the thing – the style is the very embodiment of the ideals the left portrays, and “they own” it because the medium’s been honed from years of having the right’s ideas shoved down their throats and wanting nothing to do with it.

Street art came to be as a method to publicize ideals that are more progressive than societal norms. It was created to be an opportunity and outlet for people who had an opposing viewpoint. The minorities, the poor, the oppressed and the downright angry weren't getting any coverage in mainstream media, so they began putting their anti(this)establishment art on the walls of the institutions they were opposing. The medium was part of the message.

We’ve seen this sort of thing happen before, the bastardization of a counterculture. The formation of punk culture and all it embodied (literature, fashion, and most notably, music) was a reaction to the superficiality of the era's more commercial art, like disco and arena rock. They wanted to speak out against the commodification of artistic expression… and now you can walk into any mall in North America and find a Misfits shirt in the Urban Behavior window.

It seems to be the pattern – subculture forms as a way to speak out against the established norm, businesspeople see an opportunity to market the rebel, living-onthe- edge mentality to it’s otherwise sedentary target market, and the practices slowly slip out of the grips of its creators and into the hands of those who it opposed.

And so though SABO thinks he’s “on the edge, the only true rebel artist in LA,” what he’s doing is perpetuating the very institutions that will aid in the demise of his craft. He is using a medium that came about because progressive artists had no choice but to publish their artwork this way or be silenced by the people he’s representing.

I’m into irony, but come on.

It is likely that street art will suffer death by capitalism (it is already being commissioned by companies as advertisement). The pioneers of the medium may have to abandon post and come up with a new way to break apart from the norm, making their message heard in a society saturated with frivolity.

SABO believes that it’s unfair his viewpoint is not represented in the realm of street art. To complain that his message isn’t being spread is ludicrous when modern society has been shaped on his ideals, which is something that street artists have never and (unfortunately) will not experience in the foreseeable future.
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