art crime

Found on Chicago’s South Side

A video created by the Graffiti Research Lab, hits on an issue that has always irked me. If you paint a train with graffiti and get caught you can kiss much of your life goodbye. You will likely be jailed, fined and otherwise punished by the government. Yet, if you pay a large sum, your graffiti is allowed. That is, graffiti in the form of advertising.

As the video shows, the Graffiti Research Lab, with their ever-brilliant ingenuity, took cut outs and pasted them over advertisements found on television monitors at subway stops in NYC. Two of the signs read, “NYC’s true graffiti problem” and “Advertising = graffiti.”  

Why is it that Americans tolerate advertising in their faces all day, but are vehemently opposed to graffiti art? I’ll choose art over marketing any day.

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?

Found in Chicago’s South Side

Street art has become so accepted by the mainstream that even The New York Times can write a story referring to illegal tags as art without so much as a mention of the darker side of graffiti.

Instead the paper calls graffiti “uncommissioned, uncommercial forms of expression,” and encourages readers to spend the weekend looking for street tags, rather than blocking them out as noise and New Yorkers become accustomed to doing on their busy streets.

In the “Weekend in New York” travel column this week, reporter Seth Kugel does a great job of explaining graffiti in the most common terms – what it is, where to find it and how (not) to judge it.

He writes, “Finally, judging street art is not like judging a coin collection: just about nothing is in mint condition. But that’s part of the charm. Pieces are supposed to decay over time, either naturally or sped along by human hands. A years-old image half torn down or covered with other images (often in homage) is part of the experience.”

The best part about the story is, unsurprisingly, photos taken around the city of NYC graffiti. The NYT presents them in a slideshow with captions so informational you don’t even need to read the story to understand and appreciate the art.

If you just knew a little bit about graffiti, it would be easy to think that there were some young punks who scribble and one talented artist named Banksy. Banksy’s book proliferate shelves, thank you Urban Outfitters, and his work has been catching major media attention as it auctions for hundreds of thousands of dollars. While I am not in any way discounting Banksy’s obvious talent and amazing artwork, it is frustrating that he is the only graffiti artist in the mainstream.

Graffiti art does not begin and end with one man.

However,  as this article on “the Banksy effect,” says, most people need entry points to become comfortable with things that are new. And for millions of people, Banksy is the entry point they need in not only seeing art in a new way, but in accepting art as a part of their daily lives.

So I guess many artists out there can thank Banksy for bringing graffiti art into the mainstream – but hopefully, with time, more artists will come to be appreciated in this way. Along this theme, this Web site compiled a list of some of New York City’s best graff artists, some very famous, like Swoon, and some lesser known or appreciated, like Goya. Some other artists of note: Claw (New York), Pose (Chicago) and Revs (New York).

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Additional info: There is also a great New York Times article from a few years ago on Swoon that features a slideshow of her work.

When most people think of graffiti taggers they might instinctively picture ‘young punk, gang members’ with nothing better to do. The typical stereotypes abound. And while these so-called ‘punks’ may be responsible for much of the graffiti tags spread around every country in the world, many taggers do not fit into these stereotypical descriptions.

Many are very talented artists, some classically trained at the best art schools in the world. Some are middle-aged, or at least in their 20s and 30s. Many do not support illegal activities, and instead, strive to make their work legally-marketable.

Here are a few examples of taggers who break the mold –

While this woman was arrested for posting illegal tags, she hardly fits the typical mold: 43-years-old and female. Despite what you might first believe, many graffiti artists are women — and very talented women at that.

A 36-year-old New York man, Craig Costello, tag name Krink, hasn’t painted graffiti illegally in years, but he has found a way to make his skills marketable. Under the Krink brand, he sells a line of quality inks and markers, his artwork and merchandise. Want more information or a peak at his work? See his Web site: krink.com.

Malcolm Mobutu Smith, now an associate professor of ceramic arts at Indiana University, began his interest in graffiti at age 12.

And, of course, no list of non-traditional graffiti artists would be complete without mentioning Banksy. His work often features politically or socially charged messages and he makes top dollar by auctioning his work.

Found on Chicago’s South Side

When computer programmers look to express themselves artistically, this is the result. According to CNET.com’s Geek Gestalt blogger, geek graffiti is a small, but growing, trend where geeks — or people with geek-like tendencies — take traditional graffiti tagging and add in a tech-inspired message.

This one, posted on the West Bank side of the wall in Palestine, represents one tech-savvy take on the conflict. The Royal Pingdom blog, calls it “someone wishes for a reboot.” I also enjoyed this oneof the word “amor” (the Spanish word for love) written on a wall in Barcelona. And, finally, while this one is less than artistic, there’s just something inherently adorable about a drunken computer programmer.

Global Positioning Systems are all the rage these days. They can get direct you from your home to that new restaurant you’ve been dying to try. They can escort you through a tour at the Tower of London. And, now, they can help law enforcement track graffiti tags.

Police in Montclair, Calif., have used Graffiti Tracher Inc. to  spot and map tags around the city. With the aid of technology, the police are able to keep track of exactly how many tags any given graffiti tagger has throughout the city, thus making it much easier to compile evidence against the tagger.

So far the system seems to be working. Since implementing it in January the city has arrested three taggers — each responsible for about $4,000 in damages around the city.

If the system continues to stack evidence against illegal taggers leading to an increase of arrests, it would be one of the more successful systems on record. But I wonder if taggers, with their common desire to have their name up in more places than any other tagger, would take pride if they knew they were at the top of the police database.