SF Street Art Map

In recent years, street art has gained a huge following in the mainstream art world, with works by artists like Banksy selling for exorbitant sums.

San Francisco has many city-supported art installations and murals, but it also has thousands of incidents of graffiti per year.

This presents an interesting paradox: at what point does paint on a wall stop being crime and start being art? Is any act of human expression art, or does art require the approval of a dominant power (whether the government or the art-buying elite)?

This map layers data from several sources to explore the relationship between art, money, and crime.