90% of Success is just Showing up (Graffiti)

90% of Success is just Showing up
Originally uploaded by sharl.

There is a debate within the blog and within comments to the entries when I write about graffiti and it being a degradation in the built environment.

It's a tough issue. Scrawls, especially scrawls on buildings, store windows and the like, I won't tolerate. Inventive, thoughtful, provocative stuff is something else entirely, although I think it should only be placed in certain places, because the overall objectives of order maintenance of a sort is important in terms of urban revitalization.
This graffitum by Woodley Park is neat, but not political (from the Pretty City blog.


This is another piece (in Annandale) from Pretty City.

Banksy, the artist from the UK, takes graffiti to a whole other dimension. You may have read in the paper about how he modified some of the new Paris Hilton CDs. This is a photo of one of the modifications. (Also see the website Art of the State.)

Granted this isn't on a building, but Banksy does plenty of stuff on buildings that requires further consideration.
I think these cows are interesting, and it makes me think about how these various cow-donkey-crab-terrapin-elephant etc. fiberglass "art" in the city projects could be a lot more political.

Flickr photographer Sharl has posted 9 other photos from the Banksy-Paris Hilton CD.


Recently I came across the Urban Archives project at the University of Washington, which started out documenting graffiti in the Seattle area, but has expanded beyond the original project. (I'm jealous of the domain name they chose.)

This article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Students create urban archive, preserving graffiti for posterity," discusses the original project and includes a flash presentation of some of the graffiti they documented and audio from one of the organizers.
Graffiti in an alley behind University Avenue businesses in the University district in Seattle on December 7, 2005. UW students are documenting the art, or nuisance as part of an urban archive. Photo by Joshua Trujillo / Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Index Keywords: graffiti