conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Based, London, Creative with the genre: Arts & Photography, History & Criticism?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Street Art From Around the World'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Street Art From Around the World
  All around us, in the urban centres across the world, a creative phenomenon is taking place. Our towns and cities are saturated with the imagery of commerce and advertising, but alongside these there are also personal expressions of the modern human condition in the form of works of art on the street, available for everyone to see. Sometimes created under cover of darkness to avoid arrest, they are often considered temporary, being painted over or replaced by another piece within a few days. Increasingly, however, people have begun to recognize the power of this street art as a medium of expression, and its practitioners are coming out of the darkness and working on commissions and exhibiting in art galleries and cultural institutions.
  As the 20th century drew to a close, street art was becoming firmly established as an accessible art form that was available to everyone and that went beyond the esoteric 'tag', the political statement or the religious affirmation. In order to examine this truly global phenomenon it is important to explore its origins at the very beginning of the built environment, when man started to construct his habitat and create territories away from the cave.
  East Africa is often associated with the emergence of modern humans and it is here that the earliest evidence of the use of paint can be found. Man's first foray into art is thought to have been body painting – perhaps as part of hunting and worship rituals – using pigments ground from berries and earth, for which evidence has only recently been discovered. As these practices were evolving 300–400,000 years ago, we can only imagine the spectacle of the human body as a primeval canvas and it is largely unknown whether the drawings assumed abstract or figurative form.
  The Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave in the Ardèche region of France contains the oldest known examples of figurative painting and small 3D sculptures of the female human form, work that dates back at least 35,000 years. The animals depicted here may be totemic ancestors or spirit guides, framed within the hunter-gatherer's experience of territory, family, threats and defence, and the fertility of both land and man.
  The oldest known graffiti was carved by Semitic soldiers on an Egyptian cliff wall 4,000 years ago. It consists of two inscriptions that appear to contain a man's name and a reference to God, and they represent the creative actions of individuals set apart from officially sanctioned hieroglyphics. Scratching into surfaces as a means of expression is still used throughout the continent in some places, as can be seen in the example above, which marks the arrival of television in West Africa in the late 1970s.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know two more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: This most versatile of street art practitioners is also known as Lydia Fong, Ray Fong, Bernon Vernon, P.Kin, Ray Virgil and Twist with further variations of the latter such as Twister, Twisty and Twisto. This involved creating sculptures using bottles left hanging on the street.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about San, Francisco, Art, specializing, painting, making, advertising.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: This most versatile of street art practitioners is also known as Lydia Fong, Ray Fong, Bernon Vernon, P. Kin, Ray Virgil and Twist with further variations of the latter such as Twister, Twisty and Twisto. 
  After specializing in painting and print making at San Francisco Art Institute, McGee sought an antidote to the advertising that dominates the visual language of the urban American landscape. This involved creating sculptures using bottles left hanging on the street.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last two paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'There is no doubt that big businesses and advertising agencies are using the medium as a way of making their products more 'hip' and increasing their sales to a young audience, but this is not necessarily a bad thing'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: There is no doubt that big businesses and advertising agencies are using the medium as a way of making their products more 'hip' and increasing their sales to a young audience, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, they are recognizing the merits of the artworks, as well as preserving them. Many artists go on to use the money they earn to fund future projects as well as giving back to the communities that inspired them in the first place. The vast majority of street art remains out there in the public domain, with new artists regularly making their street debuts. Even works by such global stars as Banksy can still be painted over by local councils, as happened with his famous One Nation Under CCTV piece in London's West End, proving that the essential temporal nature of most street art still remains true.
  Works by leading street artists such as Banksy command huge prices in the commercial gallery and the auction house. In 2008, Christie's recognized the importance of international street art by commissioning UK/Latin American collective Mas Civiles to produce a large-scale collage of urban art that hung from the auction rooms. This whole work was then exhibited in the 'cave' (or cellar) at a crumbling chateau in the Ardèche, inviting comparisons with those cave paintings from many centuries before, in the same region of South Central France. The collaborative nature of the piece, which features work by eight people – including photographer Harry Urgent, painters Scarlet Raven and Graham Carrick, graphic artist Russell Clark and urban artists Manuel Sanmartin, Janina Langton and Rhea Nielsen – can also be linked to those ancient artworks, bringing us full circle back to where it all began.