After presenting the five most popular Urbanartcore posts in 2011, I will now honor this year’s top ten urban artists! Of course it’s difficult to do that. There’s a massive count of highly talented urban artists out there around the globe and I’m pretty sure either that there are also some great street or graffiti artists I haven’t heard about yet. Nevertheless I gave my best and wrote together some of the most influential and popular names from both, the street art and graffiti scene. Here we go: ...

Yep, it’s the end of the year which means that it’s time for the annual top-list reviews! Back in 2010, I collected the Top 3 Urban Art Books and honored the Top Urban Artists and for sure I’m going to create some similar top-lists also for 2011! But before I’ll do so, I thought it probably would be interesting for you to get to know this year’s five most popular Urbanartcore posts, for what reason I deeply eyed the traffic statistics to find the most visited articles which were published during the last 52 weeks. Here are the most popular posts in 2011: ...

Back in 2010, Barcelona-based street artist Zosen opened his System Collapse exhibition at StolenSpace Gallery in London, now it’s Tilt’s turn to bring anarchy to the UK… The French graffiti artist, who is renowned for painting on buildings, canvases and naked women, recently repainted the famous magic wall of Village Underground which before was used by Australian tape artist Buff Diss for his Make Something from Nothing tape works! While Tilt created a huge Union Jack painting, made up of lyrics from the Sex Pistols God Save the Queen, Benjamin Roudet used to document the entire process! The result is a dope video, showing a controversial graffiti artist painting a provocative wall. Well done!

As I already wrote, ad takeovers have a long tradition in the international street art scene, especially in Berlin. Now, a guy called Vermibus took over some ad light boxes near Kottbuser Tor, Frankfurter Tor and Jannowitzbrücke in Berlin’s city and mutated the shown persons into some ugly, scary monsters! Looks like he used some kind of paint remover or buffing stuff to modify the advert posters…or maybe it’s just paint on the windows…not sure… ...

After Sickboy, Shepard Fairey and Invader it’s now The London Police decorating the cover of the latest issue (number 17!) of London’s finest VNA Magazine! Again, the mag includes great interviews with some of the top urban artists from around the world, like Goldie, El Mac, Toasters just to name a few, and features with London, Milan and Toronto some nice metropolises and especially its street art scenes! Again, VNA 17 is a nice reading for urban art enthusiasts from all over the globe and worth to check out. ...

Hey boys and girls, it’s almost X-mas, for what reason I’d like to give you another urban art link-tips special including the latest street art and graffiti news I wasn’t able to pack into a proper post. So stay inside, grab a coffee or tea and enjoy the following links! Peace. Designer Kyle Bean creates very interesting stuff like that London Tube Map made of drinking straws! Playing with wood, paint and shadows, the two French artists Sambre and Lek just constucted an awesome indoor installation in Paris. ...

Berlin-based Quintessenz Creation crew is at least well-known in Germany for their spectacular stop motion videos showing color in motion and other urban art, especially when it’s about the power of true color! During this year’s IBUg street art festival the crew produced a new stop motion film, which went online just a few minutes ago! This time it’s a mix of stop motion and live sequences… Quintessenz is an artists collective based on a core group of former students from Hildesheim, Germany who founded the crew back in 2007. With the help of their films, they try to discover the power of color in abandoned areas and to analyze the effect of color on the environment what leads them to new, impressing paint-experiments…as you can see again is this new film! Thumbs up. ...

Organised by Ironside, the two Berlin-based urban artists Buff Diss and Clemens Behr created a nice cardboard and tape art installation for the urban art x-mas market Stattmarkt which took place in the Stattbad Berlin rooms during the last two days… I bumped into them during the setup on Friday and took some quick shots of both preparing their collaboration installation. In my eyes, the Australian street art veteran and the talented student from the renown Berlin University of the Arts are an urban art dream-team due to the fact, that their preferred materials (cardboard and wood vs. tape) and styles (3D installations vs. 2D tape art) complement each other ! ...

…and then we hit the streets. Phone booths, bus stops, news stands, subway entrances, the platforms of our transit systems, the insides of our trains, the walls of our city, the tops of our cabs, our buses, inside and out, carry private commercial messages to us as we moved through the city. All of these messages carry outdoor advertising to a captive audience, creating desires where there were none before, for products we scarcely need… ...

Urban art legend Shepard Fairey just did it again: After he designed the Obama cover for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year issue back in 2008, he also designed the latest cover which this year honors the Protester and features stories from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In my eyes taking Shepard Fairey’s design was a good decision. I mean, who could be a better than someone who’s famous around the globe for a certain, eye-catching propaganda look and feel and who also started his career on the streets around the world with his subversive Obey campaign?! ...