Ronnie Polaneczky, Your Blue Hair Is Showing
Their defense of graffiti as a legitimate art form was so heartfelt, I felt it was only fair to make them an offer:“Will you let me publish your address in the paper, with a note saying you welcome graffiti on the walls of your home?” I asked each of them. “Graffiti writers could do their art without risking arrest or its removal, and you and your neighbors would get to enjoy the work every day.”
Oddly, not one took me up on the offer.
I guess graffiti is beautiful only to hip urbanites when it’s defacing someone else’s property.
Seriously, lady. What year is this?
DN: For This Next Trick, I Will Now Mimic My Husband’s Annoying Andy Rooney Tone Pitch-Perfect!
January 26th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Yeah! After all, we don’t have businesses to maintain, mortgages to pay or property values to borrow against to get a kid through school, right? We’re right because it’s January 26th!
January 26th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
I agree with her. How graffiti and the murals have been legitimized as some kind of art form is beyond me. I recognize that there are talented people involved but find another outlet. There is a mural at Tulip and Lehigh that when I drive by, it feels very “third world country”.
January 26th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Smacked down by Lord Whimsy! (I think?) Ouch, Philebrity.
Very little grafitti I see rises anywhere near the level of personal expression. On the rare occasion grafitti in situ is colorful and well done, it’s sort of awesome to see. And that stuff really only can rise on property that’s neglected by its owner, so I’m not too put out. But the writers running around with markers? Fuck every one of them.
As for tagging graffiti and the work of the Mural Arts Program with the same broad, um, spraycan? That’s just dumb. (And “third world country? Nice shorthand.)
January 26th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
While there’s difference between marking up a cold wall and someone’s residence, I have to ask: Tag party on Hancock St sponsored by Philebrity?
I think I agree with Mappy. I think the Mural Arts Program is admirable, not as a graffiti reformatory, but as a community arts project. Still, while I’ve never seen a third world country mural, there are few products from the program that I’d call “good art,” and strangely the good ones seem concentrated around city economic power centers and radiate in quality from there out. A lot of the work looks like it was envisioned by a tattoo artist (and a paper I read told me that some mural designers indeed are accomplished tattoo artists) who failed to think through the differences between brick and skin.
Graffiti, like tattooing, mashups, and pretty much every other “underground” folk art, is suffering in quality because of all the band wagon jumping that’s come after it’s quasi-legitimization as an art form. A few artists were acknowledged as such by the “official” art world for their interesting adaptation of urban neglect for personal expression, suddenly the supply of artists in this ’self expression’ market booms, diluting the “art” value.
January 26th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
My sympathies are with the working people in the city who are keeping Philly afloat by doing their best to maintain and beautify their neighborhoods in spite of the efforts of some hoodie rat, mook or other subspecies of urban hick–or worse, some overprivileged “Justin” or “Tyler” type from Cherry Hill or Doylestown who thinks he can treat Philly like his parent’s refrigerator. Must be nice to grow up in an environment blissfully free of grafitti, only to then turn around and inflict it on people who have to deal with scrubbing it off of their houses and shops every other week. Way to stick it to the little guy, you lil’ art rebel tourist, you!
Yes, grafitti has been around since antiquity, and yes it can be an lively, ephemeral, immediate means of expression for those shut out of the “proper channels”, and yes, there are certainly some examples of beautiful grafitti and street art being done, but most of what we see out there–especially tagging–is an outright eyesore, is tantamount to someone releiving themselves in public, and is done at the expense of everyone else. It’s artistically incontinent, politically counterproductive, and morally stunted. Wanna do street art? How about actually approaching the people who own the wall and ask permission? Better yet, how about doing it on your own damn wall, first?
That said, I like the murals, although most would agree that many are pretty hokey–but most people seem to like them, and not everything in the city needs to appeal to us bitchy armchair art critics. At least the mural artists are doing something FOR those neighborhoods rather than TO those neighborhoods–they aren’t just thinking of themselves, and they’re helping people to lay some sort of claim to their neighborhoods. Hard to imagine Philly without them.
Enough of this rant–I have to go to pick up my new bifocals. Damn kids probably messed up the prescription again…
January 29th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
I’ll take graffiti tags on a busted wall over some solid color bland surface anyday. Yay!