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Word count: 1104 All my life it seems that no matter where I go, I always find writings or drawings that have been scratched, scribbled, and sprayed onto a wall or other surface in a public place. I have been to many places around the world and I have seen this same idea of scribbled or sprayed drawings and writings everywhere IVe been to. It’s almost as if it’s a worldwide activity for people to go out into a public place and start writing or drawing with various tools on any makeshift canvas they can find.
The word that we se to identify this so-called art is graffiti and I believe that graffiti is somewhat of an epidemic. Graffiti has been around since the times of ancient Egypt and it doesn’t look like it’s going to disappear anytime soon. Graffiti can be used in many different ways depending on which country you’re in. Since graffiti has been around since the times of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire, it has spread all over the world and has been used for many different purposes.
In our modern times, spray paint and marker pens have become he most popular graffiti materials to use. Unfortunately the culture of graffiti revolves around marking or painting property without the owner’s consent, and in many countries this is considered vandalism which is a punishable crime. I’m all for having fun, using creativity and expressing yourself through art or graffiti, but why do you need to vandalize various public/private property in the process.
This leads me to believe that not everyone makes graffiti to create art and show their creativity, but writing whatever they want. When you see graffiti in a neighborhood it may express ocial and political messages and spray painted graffiti styles that have been based on a whole genre of artistic expression. Graffiti has evolved alongside hip hop music, b-boying, and other elements within the hip hop culture. Another form of graffiti is when gangs use their own form of graffiti to mark their territory or to serve as a warning of gang-related activities within the area.
Graffiti continues to create many controversies and disagreements among law enforcement, city officials, and writers who want to display and appreciate the work that graffiti artists create in public ocations. Graffiti can be something positive, but it seems that the negatives of graffiti far outweigh the positives. Not only do communities suffer from graffiti but local businesses and the tax payers will suffer too. “At the June 2008 NoGraf Network Conference of experts from the U.
S. and around the world, the annual costs of graffiti was now estimated to be $25 billion in the US. ” (Superior Graffiti Removal) Also consider that this cost does not reflect the costs from private property or business owners and it does not take into account the oss of business or decreased property value in graffiti ridden areas across the country. Some effects of graffiti and vandalism in a community are feeling unsafe, at risk youth, and lower community pride.
If you knew that there are people living in your neighborhood that are willing to break the law and vandalize public property, would you feel safe? It also doesn’t help that films and media use graffiti to symbolize the message of urban decay and crime. Let’s explore some more of the major negative impacts that graffiti will have on your neighborhood. Graffiti will intimidate the local residents and they will assume that the vandalism in their neighborhood is a result from gangs.
Graffiti gives the feeling that an area is suffering economically and has lower class population. This may result in potential customers becoming scared away because the business owner can be seen as not caring about the businesses’ image and the owner may not care about having good customer service, or the quality of his own goods. Graffiti also discourages tourism because a tourist will usually want to see the beauty of the place hey are visiting, not somewhere that has graffiti scribbled on almost everything they see.
Another issue is that street gangs use graffiti as a direct means of communicating with their rivals, and the longer their graffiti stays up, the longer the message is delivered. Whenever I see graffiti in an area my brain automatically makes me think negatively of the area and that it’s a dangerous, poorer area. The problem is that the majority of graffiti that exists in North America is related to gangs, or the graffiti is a person advertising themselves. Typically the individuals that advertise themselves are ooking to gain street cred, or become more known in a negative way within their neighborhoods.
Lots of people also use graffiti as a form of advertisement for their own negative opinions or beliefs. Another important point is that a large majority of graffiti is done by amateurs that are basically destroying public property with their vandalize public property, they are the ones that attract the spotlight and create the negative viewpoint on graffiti. On the other end of the spectrum there’s professional graffiti artists that create art legally within the public, and they also create murals nd do other good deeds for their communities.
It all really depends on how you define graffiti because there’s basically two sides to graffiti. In conclusion I believe that graffiti in general results in far more negative outcomes than positive ones. In a perfect world graffiti should be taken down much faster and regulated more. However not all graffiti is bad, and some of it can actually be considered as art and used to brighten up a public place, such as murals for example. I wish the fines for vandalism would increase and graffiti should be taken uch more seriously.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of factors that prevent neighborhoods and communities from getting the proper funding and tools to deal with the growing popularity of graffiti and vandalism. All we can do is hope that graffiti is a fad that will eventually die out, or turn into something more positive all together. This was an opinion essay so I didn’t bother using any references, except for the one quote which is from a graffiti removal website http://www. 4superior. com/graffiti- removal-abatement/graffti-removal-case-studies. html#. Upvma8RDtylJ