by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo
The average college student may not go to art galleries very often or spend a significant portion of his or her money on paintings, but art is far from dead.
Why am I so confident about this? Graffiti.
Graffiti isn't just about tagging, vandalism or gang signs. Most of it is about art. Nearly every continent on Earth has its own tradition of street art now, painted illegally in the dead of night using the ample wall space of cities as a canvas.
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It may not be Rembrandt, but in many places around the world, graffiti is the most vibrant form of visual art that exists. Just think about it - young people are willing to sneak around at night and break the law just to paint. If that's not dedication to art, I don't know what is.
Discrimination against graffiti has its roots in classism and racism. Only rich, dead, white males should be considered true artists, many in our culture assume. But just because the aesthetic standards are different and the artists haven't studied at expensive schools does not mean their work is any less important than famous painters of the past. Just imagine if, instead of having special police squads assigned to hunt them down, we gave money to aspiring graffiti artists and let them work in plain sight. If society encouraged them instead of putting them down, we might see an explosion of beautiful colors and mind-blowing designs all over the ugly, sterile cities of the U.S.
As much as our city likes to put down graffiti, I'd be much happier living somewhere with a population that actively decorated every building it saw. Imagine if every highway overpass had a 10-foot-tall painting on it of wildly imaginative lettering. Wouldn't that be more fun to look at than plain concrete? I, for one, have seen plenty of that already.
People are apt to say the arts are dying these days. Large theater productions are less popular; no more than one in 100 people can name a contemporary painter; literary authors are less famous than football commentators; and if you go to a symphony more than once a year, you're kind of weird. The arts aren't dying, though - the old forms are.
Instead of popular classical composers or poets, we have rappers who can wield words for hours at a time as though they have the entire world in their mouths. Rather than dreaming of becoming a famous playwright, you could buy a digital video camera and make a brilliant independent movie for less than $10,000. Instead of studying classical forms of painting and buying expensive canvases, you can go to Wal-Mart, buy a can of spray paint and weave your statement onto some cement.
It's time we acknowledge that graffiti has the potential to be a great art form. Instead of persecuting it, we should encourage people to continue pushing its boundaries further and further, and we should be thankful for their attempts to beautify the world's squalid urban centers.
