Graffiti Urban Art Essay

The Urban Art: Graffiti Your drive to work takes you through an urban neighborhood full of advertisements and billboards which barely grab your attention, but in recent weeks, a rise in vibrant images and tags sprawled across buildings and shadowed under archways catch your interest and pique your imagination. Despite a controversy over whether graffiti can exist as art or not, the “artists” who create these works believe graffiti is an art. In my opinion graffiti conveys all the same qualities as “good” art, and should be treated as such whether it’s on private property or not, with some exceptions, such as where the graffiti is displayed and what it consists of. Graffiti is an art; innovative and generally expressive of some type of emotion, concern, or tells a bit of a story. “Graffiti, supporters such as” Beth Arnold, a journalist in the Huffington Post, says graffiti “can be the community 's own free-form method of urban renewal” (Infobase, 2011, para. 37) because it has the potential to become “street art that enhances a piece of the cityscape, that can present an artistic vision that delights and enthralls, as well as allowing an artist a canvas on which to express himself. Street …show more content…
Since “the boundary between what constitutes thoughtful expression in a public space and mere defacement is elusive” (Infobase, 2011, para. 43) there are many graffiti artists that I would not consider artists, some of which include taggers (unless time and consideration is used in the process), those that spray vulgar words and images, and “bombers” who raid subway and train stations after dark. The main reason I would say these are not artists due to their lack of empathy for their surroundings, and because the only reason they are creating graffiti is for themselves, not for others to enjoy. Art should be seen and appreciated by those that see