Spray-for-Pay
Keith Haring's Graffiti Bridge
Some of my childhood friends had very strange parents. They were what I now understand to have been college-educated progressives, applying the esteem-building parenting techniques popular in those libertine, mood ring Seventies. They listened attentively to everything their children said, including fantasies of surfing with Cookie Monster. They actively encouraged their kids’ obsessions, be it Star Trek or that goddam Doctor Doolittle record they never stopped playing. They let the kids address them as Dan and Brenda.
It was a weird, Pushmi-Pullyu parenting strategy, with restrictions on sugar and TV time, but free-range allowances for creative expression. The kids chose their own mismatched clothes. They were given their preferred mohawks and purple permanents. And strangest of all, they were allowed to draw on their bedroom walls.
In those bygone days, defacing walls, even with artistic intent, was considered the occupation of shitbags. Low-cranium men in strip club lavatories scrawled dirty limericks and stick-figure titties on the stalls.1 Urban decay was measured by the amount of graffiti on buses and subway cars. Drawing on walls was a violation falling somewhere between public defecation and arson. I felt these fellow toddlers, allowed to scribble amateur Batmen and unicorns on the sheetrock, were becoming drunk on a dangerous level of liberation. Prison time was surely in their future.
My attitude toward graffiti changed in my teens, when I began to associate the tagging of public spaces with anti-corporate activism. Street artists were altering billboards and bus stop ads to subvert the messages of Madison Avenue, exposing the “obey” inherent in the selling of pizza rolls and law firms. In this context, even the lowliest spray-paint vandal seemed noble, provided his illegible tags covered Wal-Marts and Chick-fil-As.
But I was soon disabused of this notion that graffiti was a desperate cry of the poor and oppressed. As all countercultures are eventually absorbed by private equity, so did the street memers soon begin selling their services to Coca-Cola and Sony. At the same time, hipster cred regularly garnered acceptance of the saggy pants set into the ivory towers of high (dollar) art. Tagging had always been, after all, an act of self-promotion. These hoodlums worked harder on their personal brands than a hundred Gwenyths, and Crack Alley was considered just another road to Sotheby’s.
The mainstream embrace of Banksyism is exemplified in the general attitude of my current neighbors. Here, in the leftist enclave of Wuppertal, Germany, graffiti has been happily accepted as an element of inner-city chic, its tagger culture the lifeblood of urban vitality. Graffiti is everywhere. The art supply stores are spray-can outlets. Tags infect all public surfaces, which serve as backdrops for local politicians to register their boho bona fides in campaign ads. Public parks, playgrounds, and bike trails eagerly invite the paint huffers to hipsterize their spaces with lowbrow graphics. Art councils lure the street beat aesthetic into their museums, hoping the au courant leaves a funk. The feeling seems to be that, if spray is inevitable, lie back and exploit it.
There is still an element of protest implied in all this defacement. But for the German tagger itching to fight the power, there are no unsightly Costcos to cover in slogans, no Cartier billboards to remix. There’s no culture jamming going on here. Unlike in most of America, where graffiti just adds proletarian ug to mass-market ugly, this part of Europe is not a sprawling strip mall begging to be vandalized. It’s full of reasonably attractive apartment houses, with classical facades, that ain’t hurtin’ nobody. That the locals would consider Wuppertal’s schools, cathedrals, and cobblestone café districts somehow improved by hip-hop Smurfs and doob-toking Bart Simpsons smeared across the exteriors is outside my range of aesthetic criticism.2
In short, I’m agin it. Like tattoos, street art has lost its respectability as the domain of ex-cons and biker gangs to become a grandma-approved, corporate-partnered mall product for the terminally caucasian. And yes, as implied above, I blame the parents. All this fortitude-boosting encouragement to freely distribute one’s infantile enthusiasms, perhaps to paint the town with colorful branding, maybe even building a legitimate art career in the process. Well, I, for one, do not approve of the rambunctious slathering of graphics on every bus bench and bike rack. My political posters will feature blank walls to spread my campaign promise to remove street art and stickers from the homes, schools, and public transport of our fair city, and constrain them to the traditional formats of artistic media where they belong.
Like Swatch watches.
- A.H.
In the interest of fairness, I should say that I’ve always found Keith Haring’s graphics charming enough. The only Banksy exhibition I’d want to see, however, would be his public flogging.
Although, in parts of the Deep South, one may find men’s room graffiti consisting entirely of bible verses. A sort of moral-majority degeneracy.
And you’ll forgive this battle-scarred American for rolling his eyes when a German youth with access to free childcare sprays “fight the patriarchy” in neon green outside the Gesundheitsamt.
Banksy isn't an artist. He's a post-modern flavor..