Underground Graffiti Artists Enter the Mainstream

To the dismay of hard-knocks and punks alike, graffiti has finally been appropriated by the art world.

This is not to say that graffiti has in any way lost its potency—we at Columbia felt the power of graffiti just last year when anti-Semitic writings appeared on the bathroom walls of Lewisohn Hall.

For a long time, New York City had been hostile towards graffiti—and not just discriminatory graffiti—spending gobs of money on graffiti removal even when city funds were scarce.

Despite graffiti art’s mischievous—and sometimes even dangerous—reputation, a certain strain of graffiti in a more easy-to-digest form has always been lurking on the sidelines of the art world as of late. And in the past few months, it has been particularly conspicuous in New York.

Just last week, Keith Haring, a graffiti artist best known for his AIDS-related work during the 1990s, was the theme for a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Even pop-art-inspired clothing designer Jeremy Scott has caught on to the trend, designing Haring-inspired track suits. Perhaps propelling Haring’s sudden retro-trendiness, Deitch Projects has recently sponsored a commemorative mural for Haring at Houston and Bowery streets, and presented a retrospective of Haring’s “Ten Commandments” in its Long Island City studio, on display until Dec. 21.

A mural titled Let Them Eat Crack by one-name wonder Banksy recently popped up this October in the same neighborhood (on Howard and Broadway) as the Haring mural. Strangely, Banksy, best known for his politically charged images, did not actually paint the mural himself. Instead, he paid the advertising firm Colossal Media to paint this advertisement for crack cocaine in an attempt to question the ethics of advertising agencies. Despite his propensity to criticize institutions (including museums and galleries), Banksy has also been cordially accepted into the art scene, selling bits of tagged concrete walls and vandalized car doors at the major art auction house Sotheby’s last September.

Despite mainstream acceptance, graffiti has not lost its subversive nature. In fact, many artists hailing from art school are drawn to the romanticized secrecy of graffiti art, particularly because of its emphasis on the power of persona and its foundations in subculture.

Graffiti artist Gaia celebrates the anonymity of street art by refraining from tagging his walls with a calligraphic signature. Instead, his work, seen in little nooks and crannies of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant, is identifiable by its realism and monochromatic colors. Repeated images—one favorite is of a man with a fist in his mouth whose bottom half is made entirely of snakes—takes the place of the artist’s signature. Gaia’s work is usually found amidst layers and layers of graffiti, suggesting the difficulty for street artists to establish turf and street recognition. But as a graffiti artist and art school dropout noted in a recent interview, it is not uncommon for graffiti artists to aim for art world exposure in a gallery setting.

Just two weeks ago, Brooklyn-based artist Aakash Nihalani introduced his 3-D boxes made with colored tape, which usually find their way onto doors, walls, and subway grates at the 17 Frost gallery space in Williamsburg. Nihalani’s graffiti plays with public space—by duct-taping these trompe l’oeil designs to his surfaces, Nihalani conveys his love affair with the environment rather than a desire to lay claim on the surroundings, as is the case with more traditional graffiti.

In the past, marginalized groups used graffiti as a means to declare their presence and reclaim their environment, but it seems that this has been reduced to an amusing art world fad. Maybe it’s best not to think of this strain of graffiti as commodified by the art world. Rather, these graffiti artists are claiming a segment of the art world as their territory.

Tags: Arts & Entertainment, Hannah Kahng