[URBAN NOTE] "The question of graffiti"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's Dylan Reid makes an argument in defense of a certain type of graffiti, threatened by an anti-graffiti campaign of the mayor.

Any debate really boils down to what to do about elaborate, highly-designed graffiti pieces in the following situations:

*where the property owner has created the murals themselves
* where the property owner had explicitly or implicitly invited the decoration of the surface by someone else
*where the property owner does not care that the surface has been decorated and has no desire to remove it.

In the first two cases, it's hard to see why the City should interfere. Surely, if the property owner indicates that they have created a mural or invited someone to do so, that should be enough for it to be "designated." But the case of two recent murals in the west end shows that the City doesn't think that's enough, and that some official body has to make the designation. In the end, the two murals were exempted by Etobicoke-York community council, but no-one should have to go through that much fuss to decorate their own building.

It's the same for implicit invitations to decorate a wall. On a popular Jane's Walk through "Graffiti Alley" (technically Rush Lane, south of Queen between Spadina and Portland) a couple of years ago, a member of the local community described how one property owner built a large wood frame on the back of their building in the alley, silently inviting some artist to create a mural on his wall -- an invitation that was taken up, with an artist laying claim to the space and creating a new mural each year. Creating a situation where this property owner could be charged for cleanup, or have to go through elaborate administrative hassles, for a gesture that created a free piece of public art on their own property in a neglected space is counter-productive, to say the least. In these cases, it's hard to see any reason why the city should intervene unless it is somehow unsafe or clearly offensive (or is in fact a commercial venture, such as a third-party ad, which is regulated separately).

Commenter El Sid MKII takes issue with Reid's definition.

The pro-graffiti movement is contradictory - if not outright lying - on this matter, as stylized, elaborate tagging has been put forward as "art" by its apologists (think 1970s-New-York-subway-graffiti-nostalgists) for years and so this is a duplicitous shifting-the-goalpost situation, where the more so-called "tags" are classified as "art", the wider the definition of what constitutes exempted activity from the stricter definition of "criminal vandalism" becomes, which is a clever device used by many to justify increased amounts of vandalism in the first place. Oh sure, they qualify it by saying that ugly tagging is wrong, blah blah blah, but I don't think they mean it and really, are just playing both sides of the fence to advance their agenda. Allowing one form of tagging, leads to more of the other as the standard shifts downwards, in part due to a there's-nothing-you-can-do-about-it mentality of appeasement that led to graffiti alley in the first place. Look at it this way. Imagine if, say, Ford was mayor around 1990 when all this began, would we be having this discussion? No, we wouldn't, and this is an important point: graffiti is not inevitable despite the wishes of many at BlogTo and here to wish it so.

And this is also why, outside of forums such as Derek's and here, this crackdown will prompt untold numbers of nodding heads and about-time's from readers seeing this. I think Ford, in his own way, sees the disingenuousness of the whole "street art" movement that Miller was blind to, and has basically said, f**k it, that's it, enough of this bullshit and has unleashed the hounds. And yes, the murals seem to be immune, for now, but we'll see. I would not be surprised (and I frankly agree) that the presence of murals fosters an environment in which more tagging occurs (a chicken-and-egg argument I don't have the energy to get into), but the fact that this enforcement team is now *institutionalized* tells me the game has changed. The old laissez-faire argument won't work. I mean, just look at Open File's numbers: more clean-up orders in the past two months than in the previous FIVE YEARS. If that isn't indicative of what I would (perhaps hyperbolically) call criminal negligence of the Miller administration on this matter, I don't know what is. Miller makes August Heckscher III look like Julian Fantino.

Thoughts?