If you are a business owner or an architect or most of the public, graffiti is just a vain effort by amateur artists to have an impact they won't get in the real world of art - but a sociologist wants to rehabilitate that image.
Michigan State University sociologist Toby Ten Eyck argues that graffiti, which is commonly perceived as disenfranchised or troublemaking kids engaging in visual pollution, is instead art. And media needs to start portraying it that way.
Ten Eyck analyzed a year's worth of news coverage in U.S. local and national publications and found the majority of articles tied the presence of graffiti to crime and blight. That makes sense. Most of it is done in high-crime areas - because it is graffiti, most businesses paint over it. Some journalists are more sympathetic, framing it as an expression of solidarity among alienated youth, a public platform for social commentary or even a community builder. Like a literature professor who claims a blue wall in a story is a visual fabric being maintained while a metaphor plays on various levels, they read too much into it, but Ten Eyck insists graffiti is becoming more accepted around the country. Of course, in some areas of the country, violent crime also gets dismissed with 'that is just the way it is' but we still want less of it.
Some of it is good, but that is so rare it gets international attention. No one complains about the Mona Lisa but a knock-off of the Mona Lisa on the wall of your business is unwelcome. And so a Hurricane Katrina-related stenciling on a vacant building by renowned graffiti artist Banksy in New Orleans, which portrays a girl holding an umbrella while the rain is coming from within the umbrella (signifying that things meant to protect people can also harm them) is instead protected by clear plastic now. When it is good, it is a mural. But not all graffiti is a valuable mural. All of the junk next to it is not inspiring anyone and it is false equivalence to say all things need to be extolled to highlight a few.
Rain Girl in New Orleans. Sometimes it becomes a hurricane after it's inside your umbrella. And this time let's not allow environmentalists to block the Army Corps of Engineers from improving the levees.
"People are starting to recognize that graffiti is not just something done by kids to break the law, even though that's the way the media continues to frame it," says Ten Eyck, associate professor of sociology. According to Ten Eyck's analysis of news coverage in 2012, graffiti was tied to "negative civic justification" -- i.e., community problems such as blight and crime -- 50 percent of the time. Graffiti was framed in a positive light only 11 percent of the time and in a neutral manner 39 percent of the time.
In a typical quote about graffiti, Ten Eyck noted that a police officer told the San Jose Mercury News, "Prostitution, graffiti -- if you let it go, it can sprawl, and the city will be full of urban blight."
A few articles focused on graffiti as a potential way to build community. A story in Crain's Detroit Business, for example, explored the pros and cons of a controversial project to place murals by well-known street artists at a busy Detroit street corner.
"These efforts, which are referred to as both street art and graffiti in the article, offer another angle on whether these activities are about civic order or disorder," Ten Eyck writes. "Some argue they bring people together, and others that they destroy the community."
Ten Eyck said it's not his intention to come out for or against graffiti, but instead to investigate the motivations behind it.
"When you look at graffiti and say it's a crime, period, you're missing the factors that play into why people do it," he said. "And that's what we need to have a conversation about."
The paper appears online in the Social Science Journal.