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Street art, known in some quarters as graffiti, experienced a proliferation in recent decades with the rise of alternative and multicultural social and political movements in the 1960s and a growing interest among socially conscious artists to increase public accessibility to art. The method goes back millennia, but we can trace its most immediate origins, perhaps, to the New Deal murals created in the 1930 and 1940s by artists employed in the Federal Art Project commissioned by the Works Progress Administration. The tradition continued in the 1960s and early 1970s, when communities of marginalized citizens, inspired by the Black Arts Movement, rallied to create public murals, such as the Chicago "Wall of Respect," produced by hundreds of African-Americans on Chicago's beleaguered South Side, using art as an instrument of collective self-empowerment and as part of a larger movement for social justice. Street art has a long history of drawing art out of the exclusive and cloistered realm of high-brow culture and into arenas where more people can participate in its creation, appreciation, and social and political ramifications. It is not surprising, of course, that what garners widespread attention is going to be susceptible to commercial exploitation. In tandem with its rise in the public profile, street art icons and symbols have been pursued and snatched up by various sectors of the advertising and retail world. At the same time, street artists have become desired entities in the aforementioned high-brow art world, their art appearing in galleries around the world, as well as in the most exclusive and profitable auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's. The art has also begun in recent years to enter museums – a phenomenon which has helped to raise its level of prestige and status as a respectable art form and which, consequently, has infused it with more economic value on the art market in which Sotheby's and Christie's are such major players.

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