Graffiti

Graffiti involves the often unauthorised spraying, painting or scratching of words and/or images on buildings, bridges, streets, trains, trams, subways, monuments or any other surfaces usually in public spaces. There are many different styles and types of graffiti.

Styles of graffiti range from relatively simple scribbles or ‘tags’ or signatures to rather complex, unique images. The creation of graffiti often involves the use of spray paint, marker pens and stencils, and sometimes acid solutions or sharp instruments, such as keys or knives, to mark surfaces. Whilst graffiti has become increasingly widespread, particularly in large cities like New York, Berlin or London, since the mid-1970s to 1980s, graffiti has a long history. The word ‘graffiti’ is based on the Italian word graffio (‘scratch’) and started being used in the English language in the mid nineteenth century to refer to informal engravings found on ancient vases, walls, flagstone paving and rocks from Ancient Greece and Rome. However, more recently ‘graffiti’ has been used to refer to both engravings and paintings (singular and plural). The term is now generally used to refer to ‘any form of unofficial, unsanctioned application of a medium onto a surface.

 Similar concerns are raised in the following statement from British Transport Police:

Scrawling graffiti in public is criminal damage. It causes a variety of problems and we take it very seriously. If graffiti is not dealt with quickly, it can often lead to further undesirable activity taking place, and can create a climate of fear for those using and working on the railways. Graffiti also poses safety issues. Vandals often put their lives at risk in the act of spraying difficult surfaces, such as bridges or trains in sidings, putting themselves and others in danger. And the costs of cleaning up are enormous. Network Rail estimate that it costs at least £5 million per year to clean up graffiti, not including the loss of revenue or delays caused to the service. London Underground meanwhile says graffiti costs them a minimum of £10 million per year, and it would cost about £38 million to replace all of the graffiti-etched windows on every Tube train. Dealing with graffiti also diverts valuable police and staff resources. Hundreds of thousands of staff hours are taken up in cleaning, repairs and police time. London Underground devotes some 70,000 hours a year just to cleaning up graffiti.

While graffiti is often perceived as an eyesore damaging public spaces, in some instances it has the opposite effect. Graffiti can be welcomed as a way of brightening up derelict buildings or neglected public space, or to remind companies, councils or citizens to look after public space. An example of this is Figure 2, a stencilled graffiti which reminds dog owners in Edinburgh to pick up their dog’s waste. Another example is graffiti that appeared in the summer of 2012 on several hundreds of metres of wooden boards fencing off a derelict former fairground site at the seafront in Morecambe.  So far, neither the local council nor the local supermarket that owns the site have taken steps to remove the graffiti or prosecute its creators. According to the local newspaper The Visitor, the graffiti sea creatures have been very positively received by the public as a way of brightening up a local eyesore (The Visitor, 2012). As a local resident argues in a blog on The Visitor’s website:

This wall and so called graffiti is a far less crime than that perpetrated by the multi national company of […name of supermarket chain…], who have left this eye sore on our seafront for far too many years.

 In addition to entering the realm of mainstream galleries and museums, graffiti art (sometimes also referred to as ‘aerosol art’) is also increasingly used commercially, for example to advertise products (Imam, 2012). In an article published in the academic journal Visual Communication Quarterly, the scholar Kara-Jane Lombard uses ‘Tats Cru’ as an example of the ‘commercial incorporation’ of hip hop graffiti. She explains:

One of the most successful aerosol art businesses, Tats Cru was once a graffiti crew that wrote illegally on subway trains. Now legitimate aerosol artists, the group incorporated in the early 1990s and has been commissioned to do work for a variety of companies such as small neighborhood businesses as well as bigger corporations such as Coca-Cola, Firestone, Reebok, the Bronx Museum of Arts, and Chivas Regal.