Style Wars: Redux

A hip-hop artist is someone who wants to be part of an expressive subculture.  While most subcultures express themselves in certain areas hip-hop artists seem to almost inject themselves into areas.  From sneaking into train yards to get people to see your tags to rapping on the street, expression oozes from hip-hop artists trying to infect their neighbors and neighborhoods like a brightly colored virus dropping a good beat.  They keep getting better and better because of the constant competition. The idea is to show off and be better than everyone else.  This is especially evident in the evolution of breakdancing.  Break dancing was impressive back in the ‘80s. Now it is to the point where it is almost impossible looking.  Because of this a hip-hop artist can find a source of pride that comes from solely them, and know that if they are good enough they can influence their local culture directly.

The idea of going “All City” is rooted in the idea that in New York City you are one of millions of essentially faceless people.  The city is covered in billboards of attractive people selling products which tourists stare at, while missing the people around them.  By having tags on every train line, you essentially reach out to other Taggers and say, “I’m here and I can do this.” Other New Yorkers also see your work, but the idea is to be good in your own subculture while showing the world your work.

Although city officials may say differently since the ‘80s graffiti artists have set the tone for the colors of the urban scene.  They take the grey walls and trains and cover them in a type of art that comes in a certain NYC style.  Like whale songs the specifics of the style change over time and evolve, speciating with individuals and creating something all New Yorkers know and see as part of their city.

Tagging is a way of saying you own something on something. It is about leaving your mark and it is so intimately human you can see the graffiti in Pompeii. While graffiti was fairly concretely in the hands of the common people for millennia, more recently it has become in vogue to have it adorn your walls.  Artists like Banksy have transcended the idea of just leaving your mark and have moved on to making a statement with that mark.  By leaving a window of a happier world on an Israeli built Palestinian wall Banksy is bringing to light the ideas of the neighborhood enclosed, in that in a time past having a wall the world is incredibly nicer. You can try but you cannot stop and idea a tagger wants to get across. People have started to collect Banksy’s work because they feel like it means something.  The rich always adopt the vernacular of the proletariat , visual, auditory or otherwise.  The vulgate bible went from Greek to Latin then one day to German; Baller spots in New York have gone from “modern art” to graffiti.

When it comes to graffiti people just want to express themselves and have everyone see it.  Look at deviant art, or the Internet in general; people who are terrible at art want to show off their work.  Tagging a train or every train in the city is the ultimate way to put your artwork up on the fridge at home.  This transcends social cliques; it is universal to want to express yourself.  I would argue the only thing people want more is to have sex, get money and eat food.

Cap seems like an Internet troll. He bothers people in a way that he knows will hit them at the root.  Not because Cap dislikes them, but just because he wants to cover everything with his name.  Like the early graffiti artists they talked about he tries to put himself everywhere and spread his name not through quality but by brute force.  If you are a writer you know Cap because he’s scrawled over your work and if you don’t write you know him because his name is everywhere. There are always people out there who want to piss people off and pervert their work.  With social media nowadays it is more important to have more exposure than to have produced something amazing. Covering someone else’s art exerts power over them and in a way tells them that you are more important, because of this there will always be someone there to cross you out and write their name.

The Gallery scene is ridiculous.  You have what seem like graffiti knockoff art covering the walls with these pretentious folks talking about how these pieces are investments.  The work itself is still visually interesting but without the scale of a whole train car I feel it looks trite.  Without the context of it being hard to get a tag up it does not have the same power that a giant tag on the side of a train does.  You can take the graffiti out of the streets but it seems almost ironic to hang it up in a gallery and sell it to rich people for thousands of dollars.  A big part of the point of putting it up on a train is so that people will see it.  By selling art to a collector it will be put into a museum with an entry fee or it will be put into their personal collection for only their baller rich friends to see.

Taking back control of your city through graffiti can be a good thing.  However when you cover every wall in meaningless art, you defeat the purpose.  Berlin is a city that has the idea of graffiti right.  They have free tag walls where people practice their chops.  The tags change almost daily and you can really see some good work.  Then you have five-story pieces commissioned for a hostel, which makes you wonder how someone could have planned that to begin with.  Since people are going to tag the areas they live in it makes sense that you would want to at least give them an outlet.  With no outlet taggers will run around the city and put their own flair on things created by those in power and keep the struggle ongoing.  Whether they have the right to tag things is almost a moot point.  People have been scrawling on public walls forever, they are always going to and it’s something that should be harnessed, because attempting to stop it outright has not worked and seems pointless.