Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Remember \u201cselling out?\u201d The concept seemed so important in the early 1980s, when the New York artist then called Futura 2000 toured Europe with The Clash, spray-painting huge backdrops live onstage while the band drove the audience into frenzies of punk authenticity. Graffiti guerrillas like him took a stand against commodification: they co-opted property, disrespected boundaries, violated good taste and trumpeted their own gritty bona fides.That was then. Now that social media has turned everything \u2014 your dog\u2019s quirks, your chronic disease \u2014 into a marketing strategy, the idea of selling out seems as quaint as your uncle\u2019s green-tinted mohawk. Once connoisseurs started enthusing about graffiti, it too succumbed to market demand, quickly and completely morphing from a genre of protest to one more form of branding.Leonard Hilton McGurr \u2014 who was born in Manhattan in 1955, took the \u201cnom d\u2019aerosol\u201d Futura 2000 and then, when that moniker started to date him, just plain Futura \u2014 has followed the trajectory from street to gallery to boutique.He started tagging public buildings in the early 1970s and was briefly taken up by the New York art world: MoMA PS1 included him, along with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and others in its 1981 New York\/New Wave show, and soon he became a staple at Tony Shafrazi Gallery. For the past 25 years, however, he\u2019s been supplying designs to Louis Vuitton, Comme des Gar\u00e7ons, BMW and Nike. In 2023, a pair of size 10 sneakers he created with Virgil Abloh sold at Sotheby\u2019s for $108,000.\u00a0So it\u2019s fitting that the Bronx Museum of the Arts adorned the entrance to its pithy retrospective of Futura\u2019s work with Nike shoes and a satin jacket made for the 2024 Paris Olympics. The swoop cohabits nicely with two of his signature motifs, a stylised atom and a stick-figure alien.\u00a0But that introductory display also reaches back to Futura\u2019s outdoor beginnings, with \u201cBreak,\u201d Martha Cooper\u2019s 1980 photograph of his early masterpiece. (A T-shirt with that image is available on his website for $50.) In those days, he used the subway carriage as canvas, and Cooper shot it as a haze of oranges, pinks and yellows hurtling through New York. The train\u2019s metallic rainbow glory is startlingly in focus against a blurred brick background of tenements \u2014 almost as if it were the buildings speeding away while the subway car strikes a pose. The picture is one of the show\u2019s highlights, and it presents Futura at his radical best, marking urban surfaces with a mix of beauty and bravado. Unfortunately, much of what follows feels anticlimactic.\u00a0At its apex, graffiti added gleam to a grey and dangerous city. Shopkeepers rolled down steel shutters at closing time, making storefronts feel like prison gates. Each night, writers converged to negate the gloom in polychrome exuberance. Many also took to the subways, lighting up New York\u2019s grim underworld.The exhibition trades on the shortlived giddiness of an era before acts of creative vandalism were tamed for an art-consuming publicThe artists looked upon their works together and rejoiced. \u201cWe used to do this thing called \u2018benching,\u2019 where we\u2019d tag a train and then go sit on a bench in Brooklyn or the Bronx and wait for the train to go by,\u201d Futura recalled. The most illustrious of those viewing spots was just a few blocks from the museum. \u201cThere\u2019s this very famous bench at the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, where all these celebrated writers used to meet and hang out, and us graffiti artists, we would bounce from the rooftop to the bench to the street, just waiting to watch our names go by. It\u2019s like dreaming!\u201dThe reverie didn\u2019t last. The golden age ended abruptly in the mid-1980s when the city cracked down and began taking subway cars out of service for cleaning as soon as they had been tagged. Forced out of public view, the movement had a mediocre second life in trendy galleries. Murals were miniaturised into framed rectangles and sold to collectors who craved cred. Futura, once a source of pride for the disenfranchised, became a decorator for the rich \u2014 though not for long.The Bronx Museum\u2019s exhibition trades on the shortlived giddiness of an era before acts of creative vandalism were fully tamed for an art-consuming public. We see a few paintings from the gallery period. \u201cUnder Metropolis\u201d (1983) is a defiant self-portrait: a figure, seen from above, strides forward, brandishing a can of spray paint. Two oozing red rectangles in the distance stand for the pre-9\/11 World Trade Center. It\u2019s hard not to see it as an omen of Futura\u2019s future (and ours), a pair of towers drenched in blood.\u00a0His career hit a scattering of speed bumps. By the late 1980s, when fashion forgot graffiti, he cobbled together a living from gigs as bike messenger, pirate cab driver, gas station attendant and mail sorter. (All occupations that have mostly disappeared since then.) Then, in a fairytale stroke of good fortune, the fashion queen Agn\u00e8s B rented him a studio in Williamsburg and arranged for two years of rent to be paid in advance.With that modicum of financial security, Futura enlarged and complicated his canvases. The works from the 1990s are stylistic mash-ups, caroming among disparate influences such as comic books, sci-fi, surrealism and abstract expressionism. Futura\u2019s favourite motifs float through a vast misty cosmos of purple, pink and white. Diagrammed atoms proliferate against harmonious rainbow filigrees in \u201cAngie\u201d (1995), a love-letter to The Rolling Stones. In \u201cColorforms\u201d (1991) the tones are bluer and greener, but the sketchy emblems and logos remain, like floaters in one\u2019s field of vision.These dreamy all-over paintings set him up well for entry into the garment business, because his visions could be sliced up, printed, sewn on to fabric, and churned out by the shipload without losing their identity. Once you\u2019ve seen a Futura trainer, you\u2019ll recognise the next.Success didn\u2019t quell his yearning for the art world\u2019s respect, an ambition that continues to elude him. \u201cInjection\u201d (2018), a bright red faux Barnett Newman, hangs alongside \u201cFuxing Road\u201d (2014), a chorus line of drips \u00e0 la Morris Louis. Elsewhere, the old trusty tropes \u2014 atoms, aliens, cranes \u2014 reappear in more austere hues of umber and grey. In the most recent pieces, such as the circular \u201cPeanuts\u201d (2022), with its splashes of electric green on a field of black marker doodles, you can sense the ageing corporate product designer trying to mine the anti-consumer intensity of his youth. It\u2019s a tough sell.To March 30, bronxmuseum.orgFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Remember \u201cselling out?\u201d The concept seemed so important in the early 1980s, when the New York artist then called Futura 2000 toured Europe with The Clash, spray-painting huge backdrops live onstage while the band drove the audience into frenzies of punk authenticity. Graffiti guerrillas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":169269,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-169268","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169268"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169270,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169268\/revisions\/169270"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}