Taking Graffiti Seriously

Should graffiti be treated as art?  If it means white gloves and provenance records and the eternal search for authorship, surely not.  But if it’s to say that graffiti ought to be taken seriously it’s right.  I mean, if people go to a lot of trouble to get messages out into the world, with little promise of a tangible reward, it’s probably serious, or sincere, and worth “listening” to.  It seems easy to talk about graffiti in terms of a voice–the metaphor of speech.  But evidence would have to be photographic, wouldn’t it?  If you tried to, say, describe the graffiti, in words, and write those works in a notebook or on a screen, you’ve pretty much undermined the whole point.  It’s a visual thing.  But video seems like overkill, too–too much of what the graffito itself is not.  There’s been graffiti since the advent of writing…ancient cities, Greek, Roman cities, had graffiti.  So graffiti is bound up with writing…so no illicit messages on walls before writing.  Probably no walls as such before writing, or any laws against which one might direct something illicit.  But writing is writing that that refuses to detach itself from a particular place (as most writing can’t wait to do.  It’s writing that insists on being an image.  It’s like writing with aura (except for stencils).  Graffiti surely has as strong a claim to being poetry as it does to being art.  From a certain standpoint, it’s “better” than either, a form that may or may not claim authorship or tradition, that marks an edge to whatever category you superimpose on it.