While driving around in Victoria, B.C. searching for Chinatown with my mom this summer, I started looking around at all the old, unfamiliar buildings from the rental car. The buildings were very archaic, mainly painted shades of dusty grey and made of old yellow stone. But I kept seeing glances of bright neon colours peeking out of alleys as we wound our way through traffic…
You can see it in every major city; an illegible name scribbled in spray paint, an anti-government message hastily scrawled on a trash can, or a beautiful yet disturbing mural on the wall of an abandoned building. Graffiti is a very common crime, accounting for 35% of all property damage, and costing cities millions of dollars to scrub off or paint over each year. It’s good, you may think, that we get rid of it. Graffiti does contribute to urban decay, and roughly 10% is gang related or contains racial slurs. But what about those other pieces, the big murals that stick out in your mind, the ones made with care, the ones you can’t stop thinking about? And there’s got to be some sort of artistic skill involved in making those intricate signatures you find on the wall everywhere, right?
I took a look on Wikipedia to try to get more information on graffiti artists from the inside, since Wikipedia is basically the scrawled-on wall of the internet. I found out that graffiti artists don’t even identify as “graffiti artists”. They prefer to refer to themselves as “writers”, because they mainly specialize in fonts. The messy signatures written around the city are more commonly referred to as “tags”. Writers do not tag out of a narcissistic drive to put their name on everything, as some people believe, but to compete with other writers. Coming out after dusk wearing dark hoodies, sneaking around like raccoons bent on stealing from trash cans, the writers try to have the most creative tag, in the best, hardest-to-reach spots, and in the highest quantity. There are unwritten rules of etiquette that prohibit writing over other people’s tags, and even the dubbing of the most impressive taggers as “kings”.
Even more respected than the taggers are the graffiti artists who paint murals. These massive works of art, done mostly illegally and under the cover of night, usually have messages regarding the current government, state of the human population, or relate to some other charged issue. These pieces are much harder to accomplish, but can bring much more notoriety to their creators. One particularly famous street artist goes by the tag name Banksy. A still-anonymous painter who began his graffiti career in England at a very young age, his art is usually satirical and portrays his strong political views. Today he does many gallery shows all around the world, and a piece of Banksy original art can go for thousands of dollars; though he gives away most of his work to causes he supports.
Another philanthropic graffiti artist, Shamsia Hassani, uses her art to try to create better surroundings. She works within the city of Kabul, and frequently has to dodge land mines and bombings in order to create her work on the broken-down walls of the city. She paints murals in order to promote woman's rights and to beautify areas of Kabul that have been torn apart by war. Though she is frequently heckled by passers-by for creating “american art” and for being a woman while she does it, she is looking forward to starting graffiti workshops on the street to help get others involved in her quest for beautification.
Through my traversing of Toronto and the ever-useful internet, I can start to see a line dividing within the graffiti world. There are those who wish to create public art, spread their messages, beautify their city, and even compete with people who have similar interests as them. But there is also the brand of graffiti made to destroy, to cover up what others have done or deface things important pieces of public property. Some graffiti artists have acknowledged this; on websites which document the beauty of street art before it is scrubbed off they have posted instructions on how to remove unwanted graffiti and where to buy paint graffiti cannot stick to. Likewise, some anti-graffiti community websites have statements that talk about the difference between “graffiti” and “street art” as well as providing opportunities to hire local artists to paint murals on blank walls to encourage the type of art they want to see and instil community pride.
Fact of the matter is that graffiti frequently causes damage to private property and can be harmful or offensive to those around it. The ever-obsessive taggers will sometimes feel so compelled by their need to cover space that they draw over important public signs, landmarks, and even the work of professional mural artists. This type of graffiti can be incredibly hurtful and expensive for cities to handle.
However, the law still does not see the difference between art and defacement. Many convicted graffiti artists have their black books, where they create their stencils and practice fonts, confiscated permanently by the police. Huge works of art that takes months to plan and whole nights to execute are cleaned off or painted over in half a morning, before anyone can see them. Messages conceived over weeks and painstakingly planned and drawn are destroyed quickly and with equal malice given to scrawled f-bombs on public washroom walls.
I think that as a society, we need to begin differentiating between what harms our city and what helps. There is a lot of public art in the world that could be seen as a benefit to society through its messages and the colour it brings to the city, which we have destroyed because it does not fit our idealized public image. Instead of focusing negatively on the small portion of the art we consider inappropriate (because of its location or content matter), it might be better if we tried to focus positively, by making more space available to artists so they may paint legally and appropriating graffiti as a legitimate form of artwork. If we showcase good works of graffiti instead of putting a blanket ban on an entire style, perhaps we can encourage the artists to create works of art that we are proud to have in our cities. I am sure I am not the only one who has spotted glimpses of neon amidst buildings and become fascinated with what the careful-yet-messy spray-painted images might mean. Wouldn’t it be so much easier for us to embrace what is clearly a natural and beautiful part of the urban landscape and city culture instead of waging a constant battle against it?
You can see it in every major city; an illegible name scribbled in spray paint, an anti-government message hastily scrawled on a trash can, or a beautiful yet disturbing mural on the wall of an abandoned building. Graffiti is a very common crime, accounting for 35% of all property damage, and costing cities millions of dollars to scrub off or paint over each year. It’s good, you may think, that we get rid of it. Graffiti does contribute to urban decay, and roughly 10% is gang related or contains racial slurs. But what about those other pieces, the big murals that stick out in your mind, the ones made with care, the ones you can’t stop thinking about? And there’s got to be some sort of artistic skill involved in making those intricate signatures you find on the wall everywhere, right?
I took a look on Wikipedia to try to get more information on graffiti artists from the inside, since Wikipedia is basically the scrawled-on wall of the internet. I found out that graffiti artists don’t even identify as “graffiti artists”. They prefer to refer to themselves as “writers”, because they mainly specialize in fonts. The messy signatures written around the city are more commonly referred to as “tags”. Writers do not tag out of a narcissistic drive to put their name on everything, as some people believe, but to compete with other writers. Coming out after dusk wearing dark hoodies, sneaking around like raccoons bent on stealing from trash cans, the writers try to have the most creative tag, in the best, hardest-to-reach spots, and in the highest quantity. There are unwritten rules of etiquette that prohibit writing over other people’s tags, and even the dubbing of the most impressive taggers as “kings”.
Even more respected than the taggers are the graffiti artists who paint murals. These massive works of art, done mostly illegally and under the cover of night, usually have messages regarding the current government, state of the human population, or relate to some other charged issue. These pieces are much harder to accomplish, but can bring much more notoriety to their creators. One particularly famous street artist goes by the tag name Banksy. A still-anonymous painter who began his graffiti career in England at a very young age, his art is usually satirical and portrays his strong political views. Today he does many gallery shows all around the world, and a piece of Banksy original art can go for thousands of dollars; though he gives away most of his work to causes he supports.
Another philanthropic graffiti artist, Shamsia Hassani, uses her art to try to create better surroundings. She works within the city of Kabul, and frequently has to dodge land mines and bombings in order to create her work on the broken-down walls of the city. She paints murals in order to promote woman's rights and to beautify areas of Kabul that have been torn apart by war. Though she is frequently heckled by passers-by for creating “american art” and for being a woman while she does it, she is looking forward to starting graffiti workshops on the street to help get others involved in her quest for beautification.
Through my traversing of Toronto and the ever-useful internet, I can start to see a line dividing within the graffiti world. There are those who wish to create public art, spread their messages, beautify their city, and even compete with people who have similar interests as them. But there is also the brand of graffiti made to destroy, to cover up what others have done or deface things important pieces of public property. Some graffiti artists have acknowledged this; on websites which document the beauty of street art before it is scrubbed off they have posted instructions on how to remove unwanted graffiti and where to buy paint graffiti cannot stick to. Likewise, some anti-graffiti community websites have statements that talk about the difference between “graffiti” and “street art” as well as providing opportunities to hire local artists to paint murals on blank walls to encourage the type of art they want to see and instil community pride.
Fact of the matter is that graffiti frequently causes damage to private property and can be harmful or offensive to those around it. The ever-obsessive taggers will sometimes feel so compelled by their need to cover space that they draw over important public signs, landmarks, and even the work of professional mural artists. This type of graffiti can be incredibly hurtful and expensive for cities to handle.
However, the law still does not see the difference between art and defacement. Many convicted graffiti artists have their black books, where they create their stencils and practice fonts, confiscated permanently by the police. Huge works of art that takes months to plan and whole nights to execute are cleaned off or painted over in half a morning, before anyone can see them. Messages conceived over weeks and painstakingly planned and drawn are destroyed quickly and with equal malice given to scrawled f-bombs on public washroom walls.
I think that as a society, we need to begin differentiating between what harms our city and what helps. There is a lot of public art in the world that could be seen as a benefit to society through its messages and the colour it brings to the city, which we have destroyed because it does not fit our idealized public image. Instead of focusing negatively on the small portion of the art we consider inappropriate (because of its location or content matter), it might be better if we tried to focus positively, by making more space available to artists so they may paint legally and appropriating graffiti as a legitimate form of artwork. If we showcase good works of graffiti instead of putting a blanket ban on an entire style, perhaps we can encourage the artists to create works of art that we are proud to have in our cities. I am sure I am not the only one who has spotted glimpses of neon amidst buildings and become fascinated with what the careful-yet-messy spray-painted images might mean. Wouldn’t it be so much easier for us to embrace what is clearly a natural and beautiful part of the urban landscape and city culture instead of waging a constant battle against it?
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