Steal My Deal

The public has had a love/hate relationship with graffiti. On the “good press” side, gifted graffiti artists such as Banksy have made graffiti an artform that is pleasing on the eye, utilizing stencils to produce tricky graphics with a nuanced political point. This kind of graffiti was likely to get popular with the masses and the artworld : appealing to both eye and intellect. This sort of graffiti is even bought as printed canvas art, and placed on the walls of suburban households and corporate meeting rooms.

All the same, what of the common or garden kind - the tagger, the gangbanger kind - this kind of graffiti is often seen as hooliganism, an offence committed by the talentless. But is graffiti merely an artform? To many people, it’s not only an artform, but a method to put your stamp on a district, or even a rejection of society altogether : anti-establishment, anti-social, even anti-art.

Graffiti has invariably been a clandestine activity, even though the effects are public. The targeted audience is often unidentified. Is it for a rival gang? A communication to a single person? To the public at large? Maybe it’s simply gratuitous and out of nothing else to do.

Whatever the causes may be, there appears to be some kind of permanent demand to spray graffiti. Some cities have admitted that graffiti isn’t a short-term craze, so they’ve marked off zones where graffiti is allowed - usually derelict areas, but now and again busier zones like temporary boarding that surrounds urban construction sites.