How to differentiate street art (murals) from "historic" murals?

General talk Tagging general discussion
1

I’m street-art enthusiast and especially interested in what is normally called “murals”, nice large pieces of arts typically on the walls. Usually when I go to the new city and I have time, I try to walk around exploring street-art, often I’m able to find either community-created Google Map containing some points, or website with coordinates or whatever. But what would be perfect is to have those in OSM so I could query the nodes/ways and get the points.

I have read thru this topic, was quite an interesting read about difference with “graffiti” (which I personally is not so much interested in) Difference between graffiti and mural, but today my question is different:

When I queried for artwork_type=mural in Overpass and checked a few points, I instantly noticed that in addition to “murals” which are pieces of… let’s say “modern street-art”, there are quite some which are not street art at all in my eyes.

For example:

So, the questions:

  1. How can I differentiate between old, historic “murals” and the new street art?
  2. Should there be a separated tag for Lüftlmalerei similar as for azulejo?
2

I’m not sure there’s a straightforward, universally applicable distinction. In my own city, we have a thriving mural scene, thanks in part to a city art program. Many are what you might consider to be “street art”, but others have a more commercial message. For example, this mural on the side of a Japanese grocery store advertises the grocery store rather cheekily.

Many shops here have commissioned such murals to deter graffiti. And to avoid any doubt, when a liquor store down the street was recently converted into a residence, they also painted over the shop’s lively mural. But these works are almost always signed by their artists and become landmarks over time, like any other mural.

The mural above is tagged wikidata=*, which on its own only indicates the potential for notability. But a Wikidata item about a Lüftlmalerei could indicate that the work is an instance of a Lüftlmalerei (Q1880270), for example, which would enable your query to filter it out if you’re uninterested in that genre. Sophox and QLever are the two most popular tools for querying OSM based on relationships between OSM and Wikidata.

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