Some of this stuff is great, but some of it is stuff that, if I saw it in real life, I would laugh, shake my head, and think "What kind of idiot would put that on a wall so other people could see it?"
I enjoy good graffiti, I think it's an extremely innovative and singular art form, but my belief is that painting stuff without any kind of real message or talent is just stupid. I mean, anyone who paints something like a skull on a real building is basically as bad as someone who tags a wall with nothing but some initials done in stupid squiggly letters, and maybe a swear word while they're at it, unless the skull actually represents something. If someone paints something just because it looks cool, I don't consider that art. I consider that doodling. And doodling has no place in public places, where one has no choice but to see it in all its stupidity.
There we go. That being said, I see remarkably little real graffiti art. I live in a mostly poor immigrant orchard-worker town, driven by agriculture and car dealerships. It's basically a few steps up from one of those highway towns, the ones that exist only on the highway, the ones where you say "Let's try to find a restaurant in the next town." So the only graffiti I see is when I'm driving through the ghetto to get somewhere, and I see stuff on buildings that looks like a three-year-old's attempt to spell its name. If for some reason I get to go to Seattle, which is about two hundred miles west over the Cascades, I might actually see some real art.
And one time, in Seattle, someone painted this really elaborate thing on the ground that made it look like the ground suddenly opened into a pit. It was so realistic that even though I knew it wasn't really there, my subconscious mind forced me to keep glancing at it, just to make sure. That was cool. I guess in a generous mood I could consider that art, because it was somewhat like the things Escher did, just making one look at things in different ways, fooling the more rudimentary parts of the mind. Besides, someone really put a lot of work into that. I wish I had a pic. It was the coolest thing.
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