Police sirens ring off in the distance as the experienced writer spray paints her anonymous tag on the edge of a rushed piece of graffiti with a steady hand and a racing heart. Exhilarated by the crime the just committed, the artists runs away to avoid arrest and anticipates her crew’s responses to her artwork. Will they comment on the societal implications she purposefully demonstrated, or will they cover it up with their own additions? The excitement rushes with the blood pumping through her veins until she reaches the detached apartment complex in the middle of the Bronx she calls home. The city’s renovation projects keep her little sisters up through the night as the richer parts of her city demand beautification of the dirty slum areas in which she has been raised. Graffiti helps her to forget these troubles, providing a group of people who understand her and allow her to escape from a society that constantly chooses to ignore her.
Tags compose the most basic component of graffiti, a simple signature or symbol to notify others within the community who made which artwork. The most serious artists, known as writers, typically have the most recognizable tags and come to be admired by scribblers and toys, the lesser artists. To the simple passerby, one tag may appear as meaningless lettering whereas taggers and groups of taggers, or crews, may stop in awe when they spot the tag of a well-respected writer. Now, imagine a refined art museum such as the Louvre or the MOMA. Funded by highly esteemed individuals and regarded worldwide as necessary tourist attractions, they display hundreds of breathtaking and famous artworks within their corridors. The streets and alleyways of cities like Paris and New York resemble such museums as each exhibits countless graffiti pieces for the public eye to freely regard. Such analogies between struggles, history, and elements of graffiti provide undeniable proof it falls under the category of art.
As with all periods of art, graffiti has its own historical beginnings. Impressionism began as a reaction to romanticism, a form of artwork blinded by the pure beauty of the world. Artists like Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet strived to oppose such ignorance with dreamy pieces evoking a wider spectrum of emotion (“Oxford”). This theory of action-reaction characterizes all artistic movements, almost as if to demand that art result from past events. It resembles a science, such as biology, where the body releases hormones which causes a cellular action which leads to a reaction from the body. Life demands such a relationship between events. Similarly, graffiti art truly began in the 1960s with the hip-hop movement in response to the vast gap between the rich and the poor exasperated in areas such as the Bronx (Rahn). The abandoned youth saw graffiti as a medium through which they could express to the world the oppression they suffered, the tragedy which consumed their daily lives. Due to the masses of individuals who shared this crushing experience, graffiti became an intricate community. A game of tag developed “where someone would hit a blank wall and others would follow, respect going to those who covered the most ground” (Rahn). In other words, like any culture, graffiti has esteemed rules and values where the most central dogma became respect to whoever created the most admirable artwork, whether it be due to complexity, placement, or even the size of it. This leads the public to wonder, if the graffiti community can admire the tag, should everyone else?
Spectators have difficulty distinguishing graffiti as a respectable form of art. By focusing on the undeniably illegal existence of it, opponents of such artwork overlook the deeper value it holds as the voice of those marginalized by society. In the eyes of outsiders, “tagging shows that an area is dominated by vandals” and may even intimidate them, for human nature urges us to fear what we cannot comprehend (Felisbret). In other words, people stray away from graffiti due to its criminal background, an undeniably valid stigma. Howeer, one of the most honored graffiti artists, Keith Haring, defied this perception by embrassing the stigma. He begged people to realize the beauty graffiti holds conceptually and visually, thus leading them to admire such art. Quickly using chalk to scribble minimalistic cartoon tags in New York City subways, Haring explains why he could not stop: I kept seeing more and more of these black spaces, and I drew on them whenever I saw one. Because they were so fragile, people left them alone and respected them, they didn’t rub them out or try to mess them up. It gave them this other power. It was… in the middle of all this power and tension and violence that the subway was. People were completely enthralled. (“To New”)
The respect he earned from his community became a breakthrough for Haring as a graffiti artist. People appreciated his graffiti, realizing its fragility which provided them with a more open-mind toward graffiti. The artworks were impermanent, allowing the public to accept and even respect them. Eventually, Haring’s pieces were spotted by a museum curator who later popularized his pieces. He found a successful career as a graffiti artist, exhibiting his spontaneous pieces worldwide. Evident from Keith Haring’s example, graffiti does not intend to frighten spectators; rather, it aspires to evoke a reaction leading to change, adding to the action-reaction cycle. His fun cartoons pleased many people all ages, providing reasons to adore ordinary places for new reasons. Haring proves graffiti must be a form of art as many accomplish, perhaps better than world-famous pieces, the primary goal of pleasing the viewer. If this is true, wouldn’t graffiti have to be an art?
An anonymous yet widely regarded graffiti artist, Banksy’s popularity successfully led the world to question the artistic value of graffiti in a brand new way. He accomplished two goals each writer shares: inspire upcoming taggers and earn respect from the public while maintaining a nameless persona. In awe of him, an admiring tagger comments, “He, more than anyone else, has legitimized the genre and spawned a new generation of imitators” (Akbar). Unquestionably, Banksy has successfully topped the tier of graffiti’s hierarchy. Not only does his own community adore him, but much of the mainstream world does as well. Now worth thousands and viral across the Internet, his pieces cover walls all around the globe and ask society questions. It demands the attention of the people, begging them to change their ways and improve the world around them.
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