A Look at Street Graffiti as Prints on Canvas
Graffiti has incurred a mixed press in the last 5 years or so. On the one hand, artists like Banksy have made graffiti an aesthetic pleasure, utilising stencils to produce technically challenging graphics with political messages attached. This type of graffiti was likely to get popular with the public and the art critics : visually pleasing and intellectually satisfying. This kind of graffiti is now even purchased as graffiti canvas, and placed in middle class households and office meeting rooms.
Nevertheless, when it comes to your down and dirty graffiti – the scally, the tagger, the gangbanger variety – this is just seen as antisocial, an offence committed by the talentless. But this is to misinterpret graffiti as purely an art form. To a lot of individuals, it’s not just an artform, but a method to put your stamp on territory, or even a two finger salute : anti-art, anti-social, anti-establishment.
Spraying has always been an underground activity, although the effects are very much public facing. The intended audience is frequently unbeknown. Is it for a competing crew? A message to a single person? To the public? Perhaps it’s just gratuitous and out of boredom.
Whatever the reasons, there seems to be some kind of sustained need to spray graffiti on walls. Some city councils have conceded that graffiti isn’t a fad, so they’ve marked off areas where graffiti is permitted – usually derelict areas, but now and again busier areas like boarding that surrounds inner city buildings under construction.
