It basically describes the key to be about the style of an artwork like abstract or figurative, but mixes in religious and street_art. The original description was just “The subject of the artwork, if applicable.”
As TagInfo shows, only the values figurative, religious, street_art, and abstract are used more than a hundred times.
After that, it’s mostly values that fit better to what I think the english word “subject” really means.
So what could be done about this?
Is it a hopeless key, because it’s so unclear? Should it be re-defined back to what it was before 2019?
I guess artwork:style (4 uses) could be used for the “abstract vs figurative” usecase.
artwork_type is well established and TagInfo shows valuesmural, graffiti and street_art are in use. So no need for artwork_subject=street_art, alas, it’s already documented. It still looks like an unneccessary duplicate on that wiki page.
There also exists the generic subject key, which seems to have been used on a variety of things, mostly for flags and museums… I don’t know why it shouldn’t be able to replace artwork_subject, unless a more specific artwork:subject (no usage yet) would be prefered. It could be used for categories like religious, or for a more individual description of the actual subject.
While I would agree with splitting artwork_subject= , this needs to be carefully thought. subject= is commonly used as a freeform text for the exact entity depicted in the feature. This causes a problem of not being able to categorize them, viz religious= , that your exclusive “or” usage would prevent adding both aspects of the information. Some specific *:subject= have been proposed, but it’s still for the grand theme not categories, and isn’t intuitive yet. Proposal:Subject - OpenStreetMap Wiki
There are other candidates in the wild to consider artwork:theme | Keys | OpenStreetMap Taginfo
Abstract vs Figurative isn’t only a “style”, but a more exact determination of whether the entity is realistically depicted. This is a very generic classification that shouldn’t block artwork:style= for other uses. Another related pair is realism vs naturalism, which can also be seen as movements at the same time.
Art has many classifications. Movements ( viz =art_nouveau ), schools, “styles” (whatever it means), genres, etc.
Actually that was myself who added more clarity about street-art usage into artwork_subject (following a few quite densely mapped areas with this pattern). And I do add artwork_subject=street_art into new objects I create. At least for the reason which is as simple as “I want anyone to be able to query street-art”. I also added some of my investigation results a few months ago into Street-art page (Street-art - OpenStreetMap Wiki).
No, it’s not enough to have artwork_type=street_art, at least because almost all of street arts are tagged as artwork_type=mural. Just look at taginfo link you provided - mural is 25k / 10% of all the usages and streetart/street_art are 600 / 0.25% combined. And if you check the map, most of the nodes mapped mural are street-art. See also related recent discussion How to differentiate street art (murals) from "historic" murals?
So, I think the main issue you’re (and I am) raising is not about “artwork_subject” in general (which seems fine for me, even though a bit overused), but about street-art in particular.
True, and to me that makes the most sense considering what I think “subject” means. So I would be fine to use this to describe whatever is depicted. The key artwork_subject seems to have started out with that in mind, and then got diluted into meaning different things and categories.
We could clarify in the wiki that the actual subject of an artwork does NOT belong in artwork_subject= but only in subject=. That would leave artwork_subject= as a way to have categories (but the bad naming would still make tagging mistakes likely).
@okainov thanks for pointing to the other discussions. I haven’t thought about the differences of “murals”, like (old) “Lüftlmalerei” or religious wall paintings vs. the modern street art murals. I guess we could define artwork_type=mural to mean only the modern street art, and the more traditional paintings could use =mural_painting. As you brought up in the other thread, this has been used mostly/only for religious wall paintings, and mostly/only by one user. I wouldn’t object to using this also for “Lüftlmalerei” because why not
If we wanted something less confusing as a key, maybe having a mural= sub-category could work: mural=religious|lueftlmalerei|streetart|...?
Yes, but I think it wouldn’t block a hypothetical artwork:style= if you allowed generic classification as well as more detailed styles in there.
It would be best if someone can tell baroque art from renaissance, or expressionism from impressionism and tags that. But if not, that’s OK, they may want to call it “figurative” or something else. I think we can allow a lot of freeform text here, because it’s really a wide field.
And then we get stuck again, because street art is not (only) about murals. There are different kinds of street art: tiles/mosaic, paper art/posters, traffic signs etc.
I’d like maybe something like street_art=* with maybe possible extra values apart of yes (in the simplest case), but this doesn’t match into what people tag currently unfortunately…
So you suggest artwork_type=street_art and then a sub-tagstreet_art=mural|graffiti|installation|... or similar? That could work also, if we can make the difference between mural and graffiti clear.
I don’t think it matters too much what people have been using to tag street art up to now, because there is no clear favourite tagging and its still relative low numbers overall. So if we would get a good system to a vote, people could adapt the existing tagging over time.
If we take artwork_type=street_art as a category where modern murals should go, then artwork_type=mural should either be re-defined (to exclude “modern” street art wall paintings – but where exactly is the cut-off?), or maybe be deprecated. Then something new like artwork_type=wall_painting would need to cover the rest of wall paintings.
But IMHO, the most common artwork_type values make a lot of sense: sculpture, statue, mural, installation, graffiti, bust, mosaic, are all describing the type or form of an artwork. “Street art” is not a single type or form, is it? It could come in an installation, sculpture or mosaic as well as a mural. Looking at it from this angle, street_art=yes could be added to any artwork that one thinks needs the distinction. Murals that are not street art could get a mural= sub-tag.
(…and to come back OT: artwork_subject still is misleading and probably useless)
I’d see it as minimal and simple enough example to distinguish “street arts” from other artworks. Probably, except artwork_type=mural which today are mostly all already street arts and it’s not worth to jump into retagging tens of thousands of existing objects. But if we go with street_art key, then eventually most of murals should get it, that’s also right.
Also having street_art as key itself would allow two important things:
Dedicate any object as “street-art” regardless of their main tags. Colored street cabinets, traffic signs, small dioramas on the streets and many others which might not have anything else in common (although I do expect most of objects are tourism=artwork, this would be implied)
Extend it with specific sub-tags (this also seems to be the general community direction - to use more of sub-tags). Like, today I decided to try out adding street_art:size to a few new arts in Madrid I’m exploring this week, with the idea to distinguish between notable whole-wall-sized murals and smaller pieces of art.
If you try to make this into some proposal, I’d be ready to provide more inputs/review and assist in adapting wiki pages. I think I myself was hesitant enough to propose something which would touch tens of thousands of existing objects, but that might be the only reason
The difference is both generic and specific classification should be allowed and co-exist separately, not mixed together in artwork:style= or anything. As in how artwork_subject= is used for categories, and subject= for the exact entity. One could be used for abstract vs figurative etc, and another for the movement.
I haven’t fully read up and thought about you two’s =mural vs =street_art debate. At a glance from personal first principles, I would start by defining what aspect they are referring to. “Street art” is a context and setting. “Mural” focuses on the support, covering walls and entire surfaces. Graffti is a situation and application of paint. Mosaic is a technique. Yarn, tape are materials. street_art= might be as acceptable as war_memorial= , if it doesn’t fall into anything. At the same time, it’s best avoided initially if there’s nothing else applicable except =yes . Is =no needed ? Classifying eg =street_furniture , =facade , =barrier , =sidewalk , =crossing ?
So I prefer if some *=street_art is considered first. To think about what does it contrast to. Ultimately, this can still result in having both *=street_art + street_art=* , without getting too premature in the specification at this moment.
That’s what we have today (in both artwork_type and artwork_subject) and, as highlighted, we can already see it’s getting messy and adding extra confusion, as this actually does NOT fit in either of those and was more used as some shortcut to avoid going into deeper details.
