Opinion | Reconsidering the meaning of graffiti

In 1984, the Olympic Arts Committee commissioned a series of murals to be painted on the walls in between the Alameda Street and Grand Avenue exits of the Los Angeles 101 Freeway in order to showcase the rich culture of the city for the upcoming Summer Olympic Games being held in the city. There were no plans made to maintain them; just like everything else erected for the games, they no longer served a purpose after the Olympics were over.

But unlike the countless swimming pools, arenas and tracks that were integrated back into the urban sprawl of Los Angeles after the summer of 1984, the murals remained as they were, left to fend for themselves amongst the endless flow of commuters constantly pouring in and out of the city. These days, the consequences of this neglect are more than apparent; most of the murals have been peppered with tags of countless graffiti artists, with even more appearing on a regular basis. A few attempts have been made to restore them by the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles, but nowhere near a rate frequent enough to keep them clean. One of the murals, Judy Baca’s “Hitting the Wall,” was so coated in tags that the Metropolitan Transport Authority failed to recognize it was even there, painting over it in what they assumed to be a routine graffiti clean-up.

Upon first seeing these murals, I thought the artists responsible for tagging them were undoubtedly in the wrong. How could they not be? Their actions have resulted in not only the damaging, but the destruction of these historic pieces of art and, by direct consequence, have further buried the memory of the 1984 Olympics with each new layer of spray paint. Each time I passed by them on the freeway, I found myself feeling more and more contempt for whoever took the time out of their day to haphazardly scrawl words and patterns all over John Wehrle’s “Galileo, Jupiter, Apollo” or Frank Romero’s “Going to the Olympics.” But upon a recent drive through that stretch of freeway that the murals call home, I began to reconsider these emotions. Why did I feel the way I felt about the graffiti? My definition of art is very Duchamp-esque; if something is labeled as ‘art’ by its creator, the public or otherwise, that’s all that I really need. That doesn’t mean it’s good art, but it’s art nonetheless. So if I were to stick to this definition, then the graffiti was just as much of art as the murals they adorned. Yet why did I not immediately treat them as such? After further deliberation, I decided it was a question of context. To my understanding, there have always been two separate types of art: ‘high’ art, or works by well-known and well-established artists that have made their homes in numerous prestigious spaces, and ‘low’ art, or works that exist in less formal, more colloquial spheres of society.

For all of my life, Southern California, and American culture in general, has delegitimized graffiti as an art form. Opinions similar to that of East San Fernando Valley City Council’s Paul Krekorian’s regard graffiti as a nuisance, arguing it “reduces a neighborhood’s sense of community, a neighborhood’s sense that they are safe in their community and that tends to lead to an increase in other types of crime.” Not only does this type of rhetoric label graffiti as a crime, it also demolishes any opportunity for these artists and their works to ever enter the realm of legitimacy. Unless found palatable by the artistic elite, like in the case of Banksy, they’re condemned to exist as ‘low art,’ forever trapped behind the impossibly high barrier to entry set by critics, curators and collectors all over the country.

This is not to say graffiti isn’t criminal; it is wrong to infringe on someone else’s private property without their consent, especially when that private property is another artist’s work. But I do feel that there is some injustice in keeping works like the ones scattered across the murals of the 101 freeway’s retaining walls down. Perhaps these artists should be provided with space to express themselves just as the muralists were back in 1984; after all, their works are just as much a part of the city’s culture as these beloved murals. If this type of attitude was adopted and encouraged, then maybe those passing by them will begin to truly view these works as what they really are: works of art.