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By Root 542 0

street performer. But he was a virtuoso street performer. He wielded his paint cans like a master chef: sometimes he upended the can and popped the nozzle a few times against the canvas to produce a wedge of paint, or, by angling the can a little lower, a thick stream of paint. His tools also included a piece of crumpled newspaper, a pot lid, a chisel, and a palette knife. Ayhan had a limited repertoire; his big seller—and everyone else’s—was a painting of the pyramids of Giza superimposed on an imaginary Manhattan skyline, with the earth, the moon, and maybe Saturn suspended above in a black sky—a kind of spiritualized fantasy designed to lift the viewer above the neon bath of 42nd Street. The performance was free, and the work itself was available for $20. On this particular evening, the crowd burst into applause when Ayhan straightened up. A customer stepped forward to pay; one of the customer’s friends, overwhelmed in the face of genius, timidly asked Ayhan if he had anything else left in his portfolio.

I was on 42nd Street again two weeks later, on a chilly Sunday afternoon, and there was Ayhan once again surrounded by a crowd, which included three Hasidic men, a sailor, and a young woman from New Jersey named Michelle who had bought four of Ayhan’s works. I asked Michelle whether she had asked for a special bulk price, and she looked at me reprovingly: “You can’t tell an artist what to do.” They made, we agreed, perfect Christmas gifts.

Yet even Ayhan is not exactly “authentic,” at least not if authenticity requires indigenousness. Street culture has become almost as globalized as retail culture. Ayhan, who speaks Russian, Bulgarian, and German in addition to Turkish and English, traveled a circuit that includes Tokyo and Houston, and he learned his art from a Mexican guy he met in San Francisco; another spray painter I met learned in Paris, and also worked in Miami, where, he said, he was expected to paint fish rather than office towers. You can buy the same caricatures and the same Chinese calligraphy that you find on 42nd Street on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, and probably in Kathmandu as well. The street population is globally mobile and transitory; few people return to the block year after year. And so even the vendors and artists do not “belong” to 42nd Street much more than the shops do. By the time you read this, Ayhan will have been replaced by someone else. Does it matter? Indigenousness is an anachronism in a global city like New York. Creativity and spontaneity should be enough.

One of the few aspects of the street’s culture invented and practiced by natives is break dancing, which is featured in the Times Square subway station and up and down Broadway and Seventh Avenue, wherever a large enough parcel of sidewalk makes performance possible. With their one-handed handstands and standing somersaults and dizzying head spins, the break-dancers are arguably the most talented performers in Times Square. And, like Ayhan, the dance crews understand the need for theatricality in the world’s epicenter of the theatrical. One afternoon I encountered Rasheem, who comes down from Harlem with a crew of younger kids, on the traffic island between 44th and 45th Streets. He had recruited four volunteers from the crowd, who would, when so instructed, line up side by side and bend over at the waist; a crew member anchored the group. Rasheem strutted around the gathering crowd, explaining that he was going to jump over “all six”—well, actually five—and land on the other side. “First, I want everyone to hold up a ticket,” he cried. “Everyone know what a ticket look like?” Rasheem held up a dollar bill. Then he cranked up the rap music from his boom box, went to the far end of the island, and commenced to flex and twist. “Everybody outta the way!” he shouted. “I don’t got no insurance.” Another crew member went around with a bucket; Rasheem wasn’t going anywhere until the audience had deposited major tickets. This turned out to be a very long process. Finally, Rasheem began to trot, picked up speed like a broad jumper until