If you want to be assured of immortality in the fleeting annals of graffiti, all you need to do is spray paint on the door of New York City councilman, Peter Vallone Jr.
Vallone made graffiti his signature issue when elected in 2001, and he has been after graffiti artists - whom he refers to as "punks" and "miscreants" - ever since. He has even pushed through laws that penalise landlords who do not wash graffiti off their walls.
Graffiti artists are angry. After all, what is New York without its graffiti, they say? It will be like Copenhagen without the Little Mermaid, Paris without rude waiters! Graffiti, says fashion designer Mark Ecko, is "the official visual dialect of a generation". No, replies Vallone, it is vandalism, not art.
The matter is more complex than that. Art has been so fully commercialised and relegated to safe
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The battle over whether New York’s graffiti is vandalism or art is heating up, says
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spaces - museums, city parks, galleries - that it has largely lost its power to engage, confront and shock. This is something that graffiti still does. One of the reasons why graffiti offends conservatives is that it still accepts, even highlights, the public function of art.
But as this is a subversive perspective, it runs the risk of doing what all minority movements of opposition do: it can shout too much, conflating the gesture with the product. So for every piece of graffiti that is a work of art, there are dozens which are the creation of vacant minds and undisciplined hands. These are like hooligans at a football match or stone-casting protesters at a peace march. They are inevitable, perhaps, but that reflects less on the art of graffiti than on the society in which such art thrives, or is smothered. 
FIRST POSTED JULY 31, 2006
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