BEN writes:

Alan wrote: “I suggest that “graffiti” is a word so drenched in mendacity that we should abandon it entirely. It is a buzzword favored not by decent men and women or by those who produce Art worthy of that name, but by Modernist Art racketeers and their flunkeys. Spray-paint vandalism is and should always be treated and described as a criminal act, not as any kind of “art.””

I’ll second that. In one of my classes at college the professor said something about tagging and graffiti being a form of art. I responded saying that only when done where it is welcome could it be considered art. I pointed out that vandalizing private property is unlawful. One of the other students (who I presume to be a vandal given the extensive vandalizing of her body with tattoos and piercings) said she disagreed, and claimed that part of the art of graffiti is to do it in places that shock and annoy people. I asked, “Why should a private company such as BNSF Railway be subject to shock and annoyance? Why should public property such as a bridge be used for private expression?” Her response: “It’s my canvas, my art. It’s my right to do what I feel like doing.” What a bunch of feral, worthless louts have been raised in my generation.

By the way, regarding the subject of dress at universities, a young woman in one of my classes remarked to me that I have never worn jeans to class, and asked me if I had any jeans. I smiled from ear to ear, and said, “No, I haven’t worn a pair of jeans for over half a decade now.” The look on her face was priceless.

Keep up the good work, Laura. I have to swim in the sewer of higher education for a few more years, and it’s nice to have a place to come to, and shake off the filth, evil, vanity, and banality that is glorifed by so many in society.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

I assume the student who defended the artist’s right to express himself wouldn’t mind if someone spraypainted her car.

Jane S. writes:

I assume she wouldn’t mind if someone tattooed “feral, worthless lout” across her forehead, either.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

The young woman said obstreperously to Ben that (in respect where she points her pressurized paint-can): “It’s my canvas, my art. It’s my right to do what I feel like doing.” You observe that she might feel differently were she to emerge from the coffee bar and find her Prius covered with “tagger art.” I merely propose an extension of your thought-experiment. The same young woman wakes up one morning with unsolicited tattoos all over her already tattooed body, including (let us say) a few vintage sailor- or biker- tattoos. What then of “my canvas, might art”?

 Renée writes:

This reminds of an incident from my very liberal college. A student made a movie so offensive that even liberals were appalled. She claimed that she did it to shock people to get them thinking and that she believed it would spark meaningful conversation. I went to the viewing (it was short and I could turn my head for the worst bits) in order to ask a question. I won’t tell you the details as it was vile filth. The question I asked was this: during the long process of writing, casting, filming and discussing it with friends did she actually engage in meaningful conversation and if she could provide us with one meaningful statement that came out of these discussions. She was speechless. She was forced to relate that she did not. She simply said she thinks it will at some point happen, but was visibly upset by my comment. After that, no one else commented.

The comment the writer relates about the tattooed girl is interesting. It would be interesting to know if she would feel the same if it was her private property and if she would be willing to let someone help her prove it. The truth is that people grafitti only what they either don’t really see as private property or property that belongs to those they don’t care to show consideration to (i.e. corporations, or government).

I don’t mean to seem to shift gears and defend them, but I think, to some extent, those who liken grafitti to art do so because of a wish to see human expression within the city landscape. As you have written about before, modern architectures is ugly. Had it been beautiful people would be more likely to value it and care when it is defaced. Modernism makes people place little value what they eat, put on, live-in, or listen to by giving them such bland and/or horrid choices.

Mary writes:

This post brings to mind my college days. I majored in art at a local college in the 70’s. The college was in a suburb of New York City so many of the teachers were working artists who lived in the city and taught classes to supplement their incomes, i.e. they weren’t teachers per se (the exception was the art history department, which employed three wonderful, well-educated old school professors). When I look back and think about the work these artists were producing it shocks me. No, not because it was obscene, or provocative, or even annoying, but because the work was completely and totally out of the reach of the average viewer. It was painting about painting; photography about photography; it was naval-gazing really, and if you weren’t an artist or in the “art world” so to speak, you had no frame of reference from which to understand it. For example: a painting would be done, it would be non-representational so there was no discernable image to ponder; it might have lots of paint on the canvas, so thick that it could be carved into shapes and swirls; or it might have a minimum of paint and be totally without texture, as smooth as glass. But the point was that the painting was about paint itself, and painting techniques, and maybe color, and only in the most vague way about an image or an idea (and, anyway, that image or idea could no longer be recognized). The photographers would have huge prints made of these abstract constructions: they would take pictures of their own studios; they would spend hours and days arranging lights and canvas drop cloths, or building abstract constructions; and then photograph the studio itself; so the resulting photograph was about the process of photography – light, or shadow, or color, or lack thereof; nothing more. I remember one of these photographers telling me that Ansel Adams was a good commercial artist but not a fine artist because he just took straight pictures and didn’t create anything of his own. This man had an endowment from the NEA; his work, which required hours of time using assistants and graduate students, was totally abstract and knowable to, and therefore enjoyed by, a very, very few.

I could draw pretty well; I could look at a person and draw them and you would say, hey, that’s so-and-so. I was told I had talent, and I needed a major so, without the funds to go elsewhere, there I was. What I realized right off the bat was that no teacher was interested in whether or not I could draw; none of my teachers, that I remember, had any idea whether I was talented or not, nor did they care (we entered the program portfolio-free, at any rate). And they didn’t know if I could draw or not because we were, from the beginning, trained to break away from the realistic in everything we did: we abstracted, we fragmented, we blurred; we used symbolism; we listened to our teachers pontificate (our ceramics teacher was pre-occupied with phallic symbols). As a student, I was left with two nagging questions: a) does my talent have any value when this is what is being put forth for admiration? and b) who, then, was art for? I thought art was for the masses; this was art for the few, the very few. My most pathetic memory is of my friends and I trying so hard to find meaning in these works: we were these young, local, moderately talented students traipsing around galleries and museums in New York City, trying to sound like we knew what we were talking about, trying to say something interesting about work we really didn’t understand. I would have to discover the true, and the good, and the beautiful on my own.

This was almost 40 years ago. The decline, the naval-gazing aspect of the art world, had already begun decades earlier, but can be seen today in that girl with the tattoos and piercings. She asserts her opinions on art in total, catastrophic ignorance.

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