In Praise of Graffiti

By Crispin Sartwell

If there is one thing that our mighty leaders can agree on, it is that graffiti is a scourge. In short, A movement is sweeping the nation, yet again, to protect concrete abutments from art.

In Los Angeles, new police chief William Bratton has vowed to make graffiti a centerpiece of his tenure, and to spend millions in its erasure. This is an example of "broken window" policing, a policy which Bratton administered with success in New York City. It is based on the premise that all public space and all human behavior should be subject to continuous police supervision.

In Prague, the first prosecutions are taking place under a new anti-graffiti law, under which tagging is punishable by a year in prison.

In Nagoya Japan, a building housing Koreans was spray-painted with slogans critical of North Korea's itsy-bitsy baby Stalin, Kim Jong Il. The government expressed its outrage.

On almost any theory of art - whether art is to be understood as the expression of emotion or as quality of visual form, for example - some graffiti is art. And the skills of some people who tag our urban centers are truly Rembrandtesque. Often these works combine visual flair and manual skill in an astonishing degree.

And of course, as is shown in the attack on Kim Jong Il and the practices of young dissidents and those who incarcerate them in many parts of the world, graffiti is an important form of public speech and publication: political, personal, aesthetic.

The reason that graffiti is conceived by the authorities to be vandalism is because they take themselves to control public space. They claim the right to deface that space in any way they see fit, and graffiti artists compromise the authorities' monopoly on both civic expression and vandalism.

That people who are turning the world into a concrete abutment, who lease every segment of their own hideous highways for billboards and corporate logos, who paste their own propaganda slogans on every square foot of school walls, are launching yet another campaign against vandalism is merely ironic, but ultimately all barbarians and criminals - even chiefs of police - think their taste is authoritative.

A highway or highrise that has destroyed an inner-city neighborhood is vandalism on the most massive scale, and hideous to boot. That one would then turn around and defend this highway itself from the encroachments of individual expression and creativity is not even hypocrisy: it's an exquisite stupidity.

The problem with graffiti cannot be the tag itself: the government of the city of Baltimore, for example, has tagged every available surface with the word "Believe."

The problem is that graffiti, unlike any given billboard, really is art, and so is moving and expressive in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. And graffiti is despised because the people who make it are by and large young and non-white (although a lot of white kids have gotten in on the action).

And yet I do not argue that graffiti should be legalized. An artistic genre - such as the fugue, or impressionist painting - is a set of constraints that lend the work form and make comprehensible both its traditional elements and its departures from them.

And in that sense illegality is the medium of graffiti: its status as criminal helps determine its sites, its styles, and its meaning as an act of creative defiance. Every attempt to domesticate it - to make it into a mural or bring it into the art museum - only dilutes its power or even destroys its essence.

It is individual expression in the face of law and in the face of the institutions that are vandalizing the world with everything from napalm to fast food franchises, from pop-up ads to prisons, from Party Headquarters to megamalls.

Out here, it's art or slavery.