Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Remember “selling out?” 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 — your dog’s quirks, your chronic disease — into a marketing strategy, the idea of selling out seems as quaint as your uncle’s 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 — who was born in Manhattan in 1955, took the “nom d’aerosol” Futura 2000 and then, when that moniker started to date him, just plain Futura — 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’s been supplying designs to Louis Vuitton, Comme des Garçons, BMW and Nike. In 2023, a pair of size 10 sneakers he created with Virgil Abloh sold at Sotheby’s for $108,000. So it’s fitting that the Bronx Museum of the Arts adorned the entrance to its pithy retrospective of Futura’s 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. But that introductory display also reaches back to Futura’s outdoor beginnings, with “Break,” Martha Cooper’s 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’s metallic rainbow glory is startlingly in focus against a blurred brick background of tenements — almost as if it were the buildings speeding away while the subway car strikes a pose. The picture is one of the show’s 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. At 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’s 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. “We used to do this thing called ‘benching,’ where we’d tag a train and then go sit on a bench in Brooklyn or the Bronx and wait for the train to go by,” Futura recalled. The most illustrious of those viewing spots was just a few blocks from the museum. “There’s 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’s like dreaming!”The reverie didn’t 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 — though not for long.The Bronx Museum’s 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. “Under Metropolis” (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’s hard not to see it as an omen of Futura’s future (and ours), a pair of towers drenched in blood. His 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 Agnès 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’s favourite motifs float through a vast misty cosmos of purple, pink and white. Diagrammed atoms proliferate against harmonious rainbow filigrees in “Angie” (1995), a love-letter to The Rolling Stones. In “Colorforms” (1991) the tones are bluer and greener, but the sketchy emblems and logos remain, like floaters in one’s 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’ve seen a Futura trainer, you’ll recognise the next.Success didn’t quell his yearning for the art world’s respect, an ambition that continues to elude him. “Injection” (2018), a bright red faux Barnett Newman, hangs alongside “Fuxing Road” (2014), a chorus line of drips à la Morris Louis. Elsewhere, the old trusty tropes — atoms, aliens, cranes — reappear in more austere hues of umber and grey. In the most recent pieces, such as the circular “Peanuts” (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’s a tough sell.To March 30, bronxmuseum.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
