Graffiti – an Infamous Art Form

Even though a lot of people would call graffiti a temporary issue, graffiti is indeed, a form of art. The concept of graffiti (writing messages or telling stories on walls), has been used since ancient times. The Ancient Egyptians used to write hieroglyphics on tomb walls and even before then, people had developed the concept of writing or drawing on cave walls.

Graffiti artists today write/draw about similar themes. For example a graffiti artist today, (often referred to as “writers”) might paint the word “life” on a wall and then paint a scene of him/her carrying out an activity or order of business that they perform on a daily basis. When a man from 10,000 years ago might paint a picture of buffalo and then write a very brief description of how he hunted a buffalo.

Now that I’ve talked about the basic relationship between graffiti and cave paintings, lets talk about the history of graffiti. Modern day graffiti started to pop up around New York City, New York. In the mid 1960’s, kids living in New York City started carrying markers around with them and wherever they went, they would write their name. They did not write their real name, but instead a made up name or nickname known today as a “tag” or “tag name”.

When graffiti first evolved, it was all about markers. Wherever graffiti writers went they always carried around a few markers in case they saw a spot they would like to write there tag. However, in the early 70s, a famous (or infamous) product was invented and started being sold at just about every art store or hardware store: spray paint.

The invention of spray paint had an extremely dramatic affect on graffiti. Spray paint was such an important invention for the graffiti world because it allowed graffiti writers to not only write their tag more quickly and efficiently, but much bigger and more colorful. Upon the invention of spray paint, graffiti was no longer about just writing ones tag, but became all about style. This sudden new interest in style, brought on one of the biggest movements in the world of graffiti since the invention of spray paint: “style wars”.

If the name isn’t explanatory enough, the “style wars” was a period of time in which many new styles of graffiti emerged. Also in this time period, graffiti spread to other parts of the country. This was when graffiti blew up; because writers were all trying to be better than the other guy(s), everyone was always trying to do all kinds of new, wacky things with their art. Whether it be a quick tag on a sign that hangs over the freeway, or a whole piece on top of a building, writers were always trying to do bigger and better things.