Graffiti

4 Pages 971 Words

For eternity, people have been writing on walls. The Romans wrote on the buildings of the towns they conquered, and even before words were used, the cave men painted on walls. This writing was first called graffiti in Roman times and holds the same name now. But as the times have changed, so have the forms that this writing on the walls has taken. In the “Tunnel Notes of a New Yorker” Leonard Kriegel talks about how graffiti’s have polluted the cities/urban places. In the same time he likes some of the graffiti that respond on his thoughts, and he doesn’t like the ones that talk about politics. He is probably (or –to me he seems like) one of these old people who don’t like the new movements of art. I think graffiti is an art, because to make one good graffiti you have to have some skills, not every person can do graffiti. Everyone can come up to a wall, and scribble their names, write something, or draw some abstract lines that have no meaning.
Leonard said, “… the evidence of the streets insists that graffiti is an urban statement whose ultimate end is nothing less than the destruction of urban life.” I don’t agree with what he said, because if you take Detroit for an example, these abandoned houses look to me more distractive without graffiti on them than with the graffiti drawings on them.
Today, there are quite a few different classifications that separate graffiti. There is the gang graffiti that street gangs use to mark their territory, graffiti that people write to express political views and a new form of graffiti that has just emerged in the 80’s till now. This new form is artistic graffiti. Artistic graffiti is a modern day offspring of traditional graffiti that has elevated itself from just scrawling words or phrases on a wall, to a complex artistic form of personal expression. I think that this new form of graffiti first took form in the big cities. It started with people writing their na...