It is usually ugly and very simple in style with little to offer and is usually intended as a means of communication indicating a territorial marking or used to pass a message. There is much that is associated with gang culture and that type of graffiti requires little explanation. You never hear of someone in their 40s getting caught for tagging. Outside of the legality of tagging or graffiti there is the moral and ethical standpoint: if a community is composed almost entirely of one particular group of people and an outsider, an interloper, an invader (as they might be seen) from another group and another place decides to build something at the expense of the native group, who has the greater right to the visual representation of said location? It can be seen as petulant and juvenile, clinging to a sense of angst that one generally outgrows. A person has to have the belief that their own personal message, be it their tagger name or an elaborate painting or simply a coded message for someone else to see, is more important that the intentions of the person who had that particular wall built or that particular set of concrete erected. Graffiti by definition is an act of vandalism where one person deliberately places their own message over an intended message. On one hand it truly is a form expression by an impoverished or frustrated segment of society that is reacting to a number of factors from lack of opportunity to racism and prejudice or maybe even out of boredom and lack of supervision or the presence of one or both parental figures. When it comes to something as subjective as art, coming from a place like the streets of Los Angeles, it usually takes a nod from the likes of Ashton Kutcher or Christina Aguilera. It’s impossible to say exactly when graffiti art goes from vandalism to collectible.
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