Graffiti – The Banned Art

Graffiti, an art often regarded as vandalism, refers to the drawings or writings that have been sprayed on the walls or any other surface which is publically available. Graffiti can be anything from some random paint strokes to a proper art being carved on the public walls. It’s like tagging the walls beautifully and giving them a new innovative look which can set them apart from the banal looks.

Graffiti uses paint, especially spray paint and marker pens to express the hidden social and political issues. Not only does it highlights the various issues but also used by an artist to express himself. Eric Felisbret is one of the very famous graffiti artists.  He can be referred to as an expert of this art who has been acknowledged as an authority of graffiti history. He has been referred several times in The New York Times and media consistently seeks his advice on the graffiti.

There are several controversies surrounding graffiti which creates disagreement among city officers, law enforcement people and others who appreciate the work of graffiti. Due to painting on the public walls it’s been regarded as vandalism by most of the government authorities. Tony Blair has even quoted graffiti as a crime. I believe that tagging graffiti as a crime is a way more complicated term. It definitely deserves to be controlled but not banned.

The history of graffiti has revealed several historically important artifacts and culture followed then. It revealed the different types of carvings like figure drawings painted using charcoal or chalk. Earlier the term graffiti referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, etc. but later it evolved to include any other graphical representation on the surfaces.

The modern style graffiti includes advertisements of various emotions, sad poetry and disappointed love along with various lifestyles and languages. It is usually mixed with hip hop culture and included several political phrases especially the ones which were famous at the time of World War II.

The graffiti art is a very famous tradition in South America, especially in Brazil and also in Middle East and Southeast Asia.

In recent years, the walls of most of these countries have faced a wide spread graffiti vandalism. Most of the graffiti is being carried out with aerosol, hence in order to stop graffiti vandalism, the sale of spray paints have been banned in few cities. From the point of view of industry experts, graffiti leads to the destruction of government and private property and consider it as an extra effort to clean up the city later.

There were various ways devised to reduce graffiti vandalism. One of the ways was to ban the aerosol paint cans which reduced the vandalism by modest levels. Another method used was lockup which actually had very little impact on graffiti reduction. The National Council to Prevent Delinquency (NCPD) was established in 1994 in order to properly address the criminal handling of spray paints.

Although ways have been formulated to actually eradicate graffiti, instead, controlling measures must be developed because graffiti is an art that must be preserved for future generations to know about their history. Thus, a complete ban is not a solution rather avoiding graffiti vandalism but promoting creative graffiti under permission must be done.