Graffiti: Art or Crime?

Stop and take a moment to study the world around you. Strange, spray-painted symbols and numbers sprawl along wooden fences, and bubbled letters pop out of ancient, concrete buildings. The messages of these cryptic writings have no meaning to most people, yet it is the language of countless graffiti writers and gang members across the nation. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Graffiti has spread throughout our civilization, costing taxpayers millions of dollars each year to erase it. Law enforcement’s knowledge of graffiti and its culture “is only a fraction of what’s out there,” said Detective Ben Teed of Corpus Christi, Texas. “Graffiti plagues every single high school. Kids don’t understand that any graffiti on school grounds is an automatic felony.” Gangs, vandalism and obscenities are the components of graffiti that are widely witnessed, but there is another artistic side, caught between the worlds of law enforcement and the crime-plagued gangland. Immersed in Hip Hop culture, once popularized in the 80s (and now decayed by cultures of sex and hate), self-promoting graffiti artists battle each other in contests of skill, struggling to color their world. “We are thought of as criminals, but Hip Hop is not a crime,” said Zeus, a graffiti artist with over 12 years of experience. “Instead, it saved a lot of lives. It was made to prevent violence.”

Graffiti artists and writers feed off of fame, recognition and any type of publicity, said Teed, who uses illegal graffiti writers’ egos to snare them. Each graffiti writer or artist continually spray-paints a unique, signature “tag” that takes skill to create. “That’s how we track these guys and have a lot of success doing it, and it’s due to their mindset, which is to gain fame.” Novices of the Hip Hop subculture worship the more successful graffiti writers and aspire to be like them. Young and daring teen taggers are the most prolific, screaming for attention. “If a tagger is able to put a big tag up on the side of a building where everyone driving down the highway can see it, then he has achieved fame for himself in his own subculture,” Teed said. “It’s somewhat of a graduation.”

The famous 80s movie Breakin’ cast the elements of New York’s Hip Hop (break dancers, DJs, graffiti artists and rappers) into America’s mainstream. The movie’s opening song chanted “there’s no stopping us,” and its rebellion still resonates in today’s youths. Rather than exercising a form of artistic expression, Teed feels that graffiti writers use “art” as an excuse for their “rebellion.” “It gives them a rallying point,” he said. “It’s their way of thumbing their nose at society and saying, “you can”t stop us.’”