In the introduction to his 2010 book Agoraphilia, Piotr Piotrowski points out the sensual quality of the word in the title, without paying heed to the Greek etymology of the concept. In his concept, pleasure is decided by a drive to actively participate in the city space.1 Such a perspective gives a start to a debate and a desire to collectively create reality. In such a context one ought to raise the question concerning the form of art’s presence in the city space. What are the meanings (putting aside the disproportionate economic analyses of SWOT) and the values generated by this kind of work? When creating an art festival in the city space, is it better to hold on visual categories, aesthetic ones, putting expression on a pedestal, appeasing the eyes? Or maybe it is better and more interesting to outline the field of the game, driven by the spontaneity and enthusiasm of the participants? Or, using the potential of contemporary art, to signalize the possibility of dialogue between various communities, focusing on effective communication? This third edition of the ArtBoom Festival aimed to oscillate between a vivisection of the urban space and a hermeneutic revealing of the mechanisms of its creation. Drawing from the idea of the city as a place for generating new values, a site of intellectual ferment, it has not remained indifferent to more revolutionary activities. The catchphrases were the notions of play, utopia, and anarchy in art. The artists invited and the curators generally focused on works in progress, which chiefly depended on different ways of apprehending familiar places, or creating spaces in which to ask questions together and to search for
solutions to facilitate living in an increasingly cosmopolitan Krakow. An equally vital element of this year’s edition was the issue of street art and the sub-culture potential that followed, as an attempt to cut through the conservative image of Krakow’s “calling card” art. A splendid example of this sort of activity was the mural inaugurating the festival, made by the famous Italian graphic artist BLU. His large-format work ding dong dumb, situated on the side wall of a building near the footbridge that joins the Podgórze and Kazimierz districts, depicts a sea of figures staring at a golden megaphone shaped like a bell, with the papal symbols carved into it. Who is giving the message, what are its contents? This we do not know. A hand and a fragment of a face do not allow us to identify the figure speaking. In spite of this ambiguity, however, we can read the mural as an attempt to draw attention to a sort of pop sacrum that is present in Krakow on many levels. The heads staring at the megaphone look hypnotized, immobile, and stripped of their own subjecthood. The Massmix Collective, in turn, formed in 2006, proposed an auction that contested the institutionalization and commercialization of street art. The Massmix auction was a kind of urban game, involving a search for works of street art scattered around the city. As such, with a bit of cleverness, knowledge, and intuition, each participant could become a collector and acquire hidden works as a “legal partisan.” Painter Marcin Maciejowski used an advertising strategy. For The Nation Wants It he used billboards and combined fragments of 17