My good friend Thomas Hawk is a bit upset. It seems that famed graffiti artist Banksy is having some of work painted over in London. He gives the following question to his readers to answer:

Which brings up a point of contention. Was Banksy’s mural art, or was it graffiti? And how do you define art and the work that graffiti artists create? Typically most graffiti artists are creating their work on property that they don’t own. Many consider it vandalism.

Very simple answer.

If I ask you to put it there, it’s art. If you put it on my property without asking me first, then you just committed an unlawful act, namely vandalism. I feel that way no matter how much beauty is contained in the graffiti and no matter how much social relevance it may have, it’s still vandalism unless I commissioned you to paint it for me.

Thomas’ argument seems to weigh the social importance of graffiti higher than the right of a property owner to not have his / her property blighted by someone’s paint-can-doodles. He makes a valid point that he’d rather see art in a public place than locked away in some guy’s private safe.

That still doesn’t mean you have the right to spray paint the wall of my house no matter how talented you are.

By Thomas’ standard, a graffiti artist can come over to my house and paint paisley all over my white exterior because it makes my house more beautiful than a plain white facade. Obviously you can’t do that, but why? Because I own my house, and the way I want it to look is up to me, not you.

When it comes to graffiti, the standard for whether or not it’s vandalism is simple. If I asked you to put it there, fine. If I didn’t, I can take it out. In the case of Banksy, he wasn’t asked to put it there. He put it there without permission and it was removed. There really is no deeper meaning to the story.

Aesthetics are of course intensely personal. Where I see great art, you may see blight. What do you think? Which is the greater cultural sin, destroying this work by Banksy, or allowing it?

Yesterday I was kind of bummed when I was running around and shooting San Francisco’s Mission District. It seems recently so much of the great graffiti there has been freshly painted over. I suppose this gives my own mission to photograph as much great graffiti as I can find that much more urgency.

That means that the city or the owners of the building don’t want it there. Call it beautiful all you want, but it’s obviously unwanted and therefore it must go. If the folks creating it would only apply that much energy and passion to legitimate art pursuits, maybe they wouldn’t be running around tagging buildings under the cover of night.

Technorati Tags: graffiti

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 11:24 am and is filed under Interesting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.