What is Graffiti?

I used to view graffiti with disgust. I remember once in middle school I noticed that someone had spray-painted things all over part of a sidewalk near my school. I remember reading the words “the world is my sketchpad” spray-painted on the concrete and thinking about how the person who wrote that should be reprimanded for their vandalism. But recently I have gotten a much more open mind about graffiti, seeing it as art. The clearest and most recent example of this in my head is from this summer, when my family took a vacation to Ecuador. In the city of Quito, and a small city we visited in the Galapagos islands, there were a lot of walls along the streets, and many of them had been graffitied on. Some of it was typical graffiti, tagging and such, but some of it was beautiful art, and I began to wish that people would decorate whole cities with street art like that. Spontaneous, creative self-expression littering the streets. Of course I know that all graffiti isn’t like that, and that what one person may think is beautiful and expressive, another might view as an eyesore.

I cannot say that my views on graffiti are fully formed. I acknowledge that I have little experience with graffiti, especially after hearing what other people had to say during our class discussion. I think that there are some types of graffiti that are inappropriate, such as tagging someone else’s house, or writing racial slurs somewhere, but I also think it can be very hard to draw the line between vandalism and art. I don’t think there is one clear definition of art, but I do feel that art, as a form of self-expression cannot be “illegal.” It certainly shouldn’t be illegal to create art, but perhaps the spaces where it is displayed should be regulated? Can all graffiti be classified as art? I have many unanswered, and possibly unanswerable, questions about graffiti and art. Nevertheless, I am excited to further explore my view on graffiti during our field trip next week.