Persuasive Essay On Graffiti

Fifty years ago, graffiti in America would not have been seen as art. Today, graffiti is not only recognized as an artform, graffiti artists are being commissioned to create murals across many urban contexts. This recent reconception has transformed a once rebellious act into a tool of urban developers. Graffiti is now used to make areas more attractive and can pave the way for gentrification. This has led some graffiti artists and art collectives to create work that is unapologetically anti-aesthetic and decidedly message-driven, often created with stencils. This graffiti art, specifically the work by Tokolos Stencil Collective in Cape Town, reclaims the genre of graffiti art in order to make visible the plight of local residents in the public

They state on their Facebook page that their mission is to “...terrorize the South African elite: those who screw us with forced removals, privatization, gentrification…” (Tokolos Facebook). They make this mission visible through stencils such as “Non-Poor Only” placed on real estate ads, “Gentrinaairs” placed in gentrifying neighborhoods, and “This City Works for a Few” placed over the city’s slogan “This City Works For You”. All of their stencils are made anonymously and are available online for anyone to download and use. This provides all motivated community members a tool with which they can assert their positions visibly and

For example, Maggie Dickinson’s 2008 piece on New York’s “War on graffiti” is illustrative of the battles between the city and graffiti artists, but insufficiently reflect the ways graffiti has been embraced in recent years as a marketing tool throughout gentrifying sections of New York. I would argue that much of the negative sentiments represented in her article about graffiti are not reflective of the attitudes of many of the new residents of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. On my last day in New York my brothers (both decade-long Greenpoint residents) and I were walking around Williamsburg. There were multiple locations where well-dressed white women were taking photos in front of large graffiti murals. At one point, we walked by a work of graffiti being done in daylight where a crowd had gathered to watch the artist work. My brothers also expressed that they liked the way the graffiti added to the look of the neighborhood. This is illustrative of the way graffiti has been accepted as a legitimate artform in popular culture even if, as Dickinson asserts, “...this has not had an impact on the mayor and the police’s unambiguous response to the practice” (Dickinson 39). A more updated perspective on graffiti, as offered by Steve Harrington, editor of the web page Brooklyn Street Art, recognizes the subversive history of the art during New York’s neoliberalization (as