Nostalgia in an aerosol can
An interesting article on how the artists from the peak (or nadir) of the New York subway graffiti era are making big money selling their work to serious art collectors now that the system has been graf-proofed:
"Its influence is such that some techniques originated by graffiti writers are now commonplace. Ivor L. Miller, author of "Aerosol Kingdom" (University Press of Mississippi, 2002), noted how the sides of buses in some cities are covered with a single advertisement. Even in New York, celebratory signs for the Mets and Yankees have festooned trains.
"It has been co-opted by corporations to sell products," he said. "Those advertisements subvert the very logic of the system. When you see whole cars covered with an ad, that's O.K. because it's paid for. It's not done by kids from the street."
He added that money - or the lack of it - might explain why officials refuse to admit that some of the subway painters actually had talent. Rather than buy space, they were visual squatters. "It is class warfare," he said. "These are self-taught kids who did not go to school to do what they did."
It should be said that writing on trains is against the law and that most of the graffiti consisted of ugly tags, not the large murals you see in photographs. While a serious program to get young artists to decorate trains may have fostered creativity, the chaos of the 70s and 80s instead made the system look unsafe and fostered a climate of lawlessness.
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rj3 | 9:44 AM |
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