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GRAFFITI IS A LANGUAGE THAT CANNOT BE IGNORED.
Everything I had ever heard about graffiti is that it is bad, it is gang-related, illegal and that the strictest laws put offenders in jail. Taggers are relentlessly harassed, and in New York if you provide information leading to a graffiti artist’s arrest, the city gives you $500.
But two years ago, when Sao Paulo mayor Gilberto Kassab banned all form of outdoor media in the city, he told me in an interview that graffiti art in Sao Paulo is important to recognize. Major marketers impressed on me the fact that if you don’t understand graffiti art, you cut yourself off from segments of the population that are often forgotten but represent your most important customer base. I was reminded that graffiti art is often the only art they will ever see, and the streets are their museum.
This idea reached a new level when Barack Obama commissioned Shepard Fairey, an artist with 14 graffiti arrests to his name, to design his official campaign poster. This was soon followed the Helenbeck Gallery’s wildly successful graffiti art show in Chelsea and the Cartier Foundation’s retrospective of graffiti art.
As a country, Slovenia is sometimes considered a little Switzerland because of its beauty and wealth - and some would say conservatism - so I was really surprised when I interviewed the head of city planning in Ljubljana, who told me with a straight face that graffiti is a dialogue, and sometimes the only one the city has with younger generations unhappy about their conditions. Similarly in Bogota, Colombia, as the city creates stringent laws to ban visual pollution, graffiti has been classified as art and exempted from this law.
There is a movement, an artistic movement without parallel in the past 50 years, emotions exploding in a graphic way on our streets – real, raw and for everyone to see. Limiting access to art through elite galleries might have run its course, and another bubble finally might burst.
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