Dan Newman likes to say that "the only difference between art and graffiti is permission." It's a good point, simple and essential, and one the Metro detective has honed through a dozen years of tracking taggers in the Valley. He's come to another conclusion, too: Most taggers don't want permission.
"They're looking for major-league attention because they aren't getting it at home," he says. "They are addicted to this thing." Tagging in difficult or dangerous spots and eluding authorities are the hallmarks, and Newman sees them, in essence, as indicators of psycho-emotional issues.
Of the 1,000 to 1,500 graffiti-writers in the Valley, Newman says maybe five have graphic skills or a developed aesthetic. The rest, he says, are vandals at best, gang-bangers at worst. Taggers try to impress people by leaving their marks, their names, around the city. Gang members use crude symbols to mark territory.
Anyway you look at it, it is indefensible. You wouldn't think so, however, if you were to take media culture for a gauge. The motif of blocky lettering has found haven in fashion, music videos, even mainstream commercials. Websites devoted to taggers and former taggers who have moved into the gallery world abound. In some ways, we've come to accept the defacement of the public realm as an integral part of it.
Some of us simply have become inured to graffiti. We tune it out as we cruise I-15 or walk along downtown streets, just as we ignore all the other visual outbursts jockeying for our attention in the society. And others embrace, or at least endure, graffiti as the emblems of the socially disenfranchised, or the cultural expressions of minority communities. Some sociologists consider graffiti an aspect of "cultural criminality," the repression by the state of marginalized individuals vying with the capitalist powers for expression in the public landscape.
And one might wonder, in a visually overloaded town like Las Vegas, what's so wrong about a loner or outcast having his say along with the people who put women's butts on taxi ads. In a society in which every available square inch has been consigned to promotion, in which unwelcome breaches of one's viewscape are legion, is having paid for the trespass the only viable distinction? Which is worse for an urban community, a colorful design on a wall, or a malt-liquor billboard?
These are reasonable questions which reduce to the larger issue of how much control of public space we choose to cede to the market. But they are mostly beside the point. Most taggers are not brave avatars of beauty in the wilderness of commercial hackery. They are, for the most part, pursuing a kind of pathology, an id-driven conflation of self-assertion and destruction.
To be sure, some taggers have skills and have moved successfully into the world of "permission." From the depths of New York's most scarred years, when it epitomized a metropolis out of control, artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat arose to transfer their marks from street walls to gallery walls. Check out, for another example, the website of former Los Angeles tagger Saber One (www.saberone.com), who in 1997 massively executed his name on a wall of the LA River channel, and who today markets paintings, posters and other artifacts reflecting a neo-gothic look. The site's disclaimer reads: "Saberone.com in no way supports or encourages the illegal defacement of property."
Or consider Dray, a former Los Angeleno who recently opened a small gallery in the Downtown Arts District. His paintings reflect the visual environment, including graffiti, that surrounded him in his younger years. But he is not a tagger and does not condone it. In fact, he says he's trying to draw some taggers into the world of "permission," to create art instead of vandalism.
Still, graffiti-abatement specialist Darryl Kresser took offense when the county gave Dray a show last year at the Winchester Community Center. Kresser worried that coordinator Diane Bush, who organized the show, was rewarding and encouraging graffiti. He was wrong, as it turns out, although taggers have been known to work areas around galleries showing graffiti-related art. ("This is competent and informed work by an artist who has a talent for assimilating the past into new patterns," I wrote back then.)
If Kresser's frustrations got the better of him in that episode, it might be because he's charged with undoing the work of taggers, and it must seem like a losing effort at times. Not surprisingly, he considers the defense of graffiti as art "a smokescreen." Kresser heads the Southern Nevada Graffiti Coalition, a group from Valley governments and businesses that meets to share information and plan public awareness campaigns. Kresser says more of the public needs to get involved, instead of just looking away. The Graffiti Hotline, where you can report sightings, or offer help, is 455-4509.
It's obvious that some art has arisen from graffiti, and is well-worth celebrating—in galleries and sanctioned murals. And kudos to those who try to wring talent from pathology, bringing taggers indoors, so to speak. But for too long too many in the art world, whether through airy idealism or the desire to be thought daring and forward-thinking, have embraced the tagger's work as "cultural production." It is not. It is vandalism, and we pay for it in a coarsened public landscape.
The difference, put simply, is permission.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.