Reading Response: Graffiti Lives

“Since active writers are extremely secretive about their identites, the Vandal Squad has often made very public arrests of older writers who are transitioning out of crime and have begun to focus more on art.”

Reading Graffiti Lives made me how bizarre the dichotomy between graffiti as vandalism and graffiti as art is. Synder discusses the concept of graffiti as a crime came from the so-called 'broken windows' theory addressed in my last post, as well as the purported link between graffiti and gang violence. Much is also made of the transition of young artists into adulthood and their subsequent sacrifice of the graffiti lifestyle. These thoughts led me to do research on the lives of two popular modern graffiti artists, Banksy and Shepard Fairey, both of whom I discussed in previous posts.

Much of Banksy's life in public is conducted through interviews that find him wearing a mask or altering his voice in some way. Footage of him captured on Closed Circuit Television in the Louvre and other museums he has hung his own art up in usually has him wearing a mask or some other outrageous disguise, and several warrants are currently out for his arrest. Although this habit presumably allows him to operate in normal life with some degree of freedom, the idea that Banksy's identity as an artist will be forever disguised because of the nature of his art is an interesting one.

Shepard Fairey provides us with a much more timely example, and one extremely illustrative of the opening quote of this post.

As the artist responsible for the iconic "OBEY" stickers and the original "Andre the Giant Has a Posse", Fairey rose to prominence in conjunction with the skateboarding scene in and around Boston, and used the notoriety gained by the spread of the "OBEY" campaign to create a career for himself as a respected and legitimate artist, doing work for numerous bands and movie studios. Fairey is now most famous for his iconic "HOPE" poster, created from an AP image of President Obama. Unfortunately, Fairey's high profile now means that he getting arrested on decades-old vandalism charges resulting from some of his first postings of the "OBEY" art in and around Boston.

Whether this is a concerted act of intimidation and a warning to all graffiti artists that it is impossible to escape their pasts or some kind of novice hatchet job, attempting some kind of half-assed character assassination so that Fairey will always been seen as a vandalizing criminal and not a respected contemporary artist remains to be seen. But clearly the prejudice against graffiti still exists, and along with it a childish tendency to hold grudges and punish people with a bulldog like tenacity for crimes long forgotten.