Frustrated by a proliferation of ugly, talentless graffiti in his San Francisco neighborhood Mission District, Brandon Baunach of DesignCrack, came up with a way to critique the art — giving praise to worthy pieces, and failing grades to lesser-quality art.
Inspired by a similar idea from Drew Heffron, a New York-based graphic designer, Baunach created a simple PDF form (shown above) and encourages visitors to his Web site to print it out and paste it up by graffiti they critque. He calls it “The Graffiti Report Card: Ugly Graffiti Haters Unite. Baunach even created a Flickr group for people to post photographs of the tags they critque.
According to the WebUrbanist blog, some graffiti artists are less than pleased to have their work reviewed. But, as the blog writer notes, if a graffiti artist can claim the right to decorate a public surface one way, how can they expect to deny the public the right to add to their public composition?
