On graffiti, Street art and bathroom walls.

Now, there is no way that I could be considered by any means imaginable an expert or even overly knowledgeable on the topic of street art. But that being said it is something I have an opinion on, and something I have thought about. Art if done well is something that should be for everyone to see. Also art should invoke some variety of emotional response in those who see it. And though street art accomplishes the first part quite successfully, a common response to the second part is anger, and it is considered “defacing public property” or vandalism. This also sometimes results in the removal of the art, now by removal I also mean destruction. And I could easily relate destroying art to burning books, but therein also lies the problem: “What is street art, what is graffiti and what makes them different from vandalism?”

Now we could get into a discussion on the question of “what is art?” but how I see it “Art is a form of personal expression that is manifested in a displayable manner.” So that would make street art “a form of personal expression manifested in a publicly displayed manner” and yes in some ways this could also include tagging, when done artistically anyway. Now graffiti is nearly as difficult to describe properly, and this is because graffiti resembles vandalism more so that street art. This is because graffiti is almost literally “Writings on the wall,” and distinguishing between what is actual graffiti and what is vandalistic scribbling is the difficult part. Well actually not that difficult. You can distinguish it by asking one question: “Can it be part of an intelligible conversation?” And this works both ways, if it is intelligible it is graffiti, and if not, then it falls in with destroying public property under the category of vandalism.

You might be asking yourselves what exactly does this have to do with bathroom walls. Well that’s simple; we need a place for this graffiti to happen. Where better to start this new wave of intellectual graffiti than where the worst of graffiti lives. Excuse me while I set the scene, there you are sitting on the toilet and your stomach it telling you that you’re going to be there for a while. You have no book, no newspaper, or anything else to distract you while waiting there, so you look up at the walls and what do you see: advice on sexual partners, unprovoked profanity, and speculation on peoples’ sexual preferences, or any other number of crude things. (So needless to say, things that only remind you of your current situation.) But what if when you looked up, and what you saw written on the wall was the beginnings of a philosophical discussion, an interesting quote by some famous so and so, or even a well written dirty limerick or a bad pun. Something that gets your mind working, and that makes a good distraction, so you don’t think on the waste that is being purged from your body, and being distracted in that situation makes the whole thing just an however slightly so more bearable experience.

Post Script: I’ve written two versions of this. Not going to say what my plans are for the second. But I do like how I ended it more simply because I ended it with a quote from somewhere in the universe of Joss Whedon. Now I have this post scheduled and hopefully the other version will be out around the same time.