Anyone who regularly visits Italy will have long been accustomed to seeing slogans incongruously scrawled on the walls of Renaissance palazzi or ancient monuments. In some countries, graffiti seems simply to be part of the urban fabric. It isn’t exactly pleasing, and you wonder why it’s tolerated, but somehow anything manages to look slightly better under the Italian sun than it would here. In Britain, graffiti’s domain has historically been places of serious seediness — the ill-lit alleyway, the urine-infused underpass, the concrete motorway flyover, and the sort of housing estate most of us would rather never visit. So it has come as a shock in recent months to be confronted by the abrupt arrival of huge amounts of graffiti in the London Underground.
Unfortunately, it can no longer be taken as a given that people find graffiti unacceptable
As Britain morphs culturally and linguistically into the 51st state of the United States of America, perhaps it is inevitable that the Tube should start to look like the New York subway circa 1975. But the precise reasons why there has been such a sudden rise in graffiti on the Tube remain mysterious. Irritated “vigilante cleaners” have started taking matters into their own hands, forcing TfL to issue a statement reassuring us that it is removing thousands of pieces of graffiti daily. Seemingly, a cleaning machine was out of order for a while, though this has since been fixed, but we are now told that the internet has spawned graffiti communities who compete to “tag” trains as soon as they’ve been cleaned.
Unfortunately, it can no longer be taken as a given that people find graffiti unacceptable. The previous widely-held consensus that you can’t just go around scrawling “I woz ’ere” wherever you please no longer seems to be holding. We are also seeing more graffiti because of the inexorable rise of political activism: widely reported recent examples include the vandalism of statues in Parliament Square and the defacing of cenotaphs in Rochdale and Southend. When Winston Churchill’s statue in Westminster was daubed with the words “was a racist”, a BBC news report declined to pass judgement, simply stating neutrally that it was part of a movement that aspired to remove “statues of controversial people around London”.
Many people now believe that spraying your chosen political slogan onto anything is acceptable so long as you consider the cause to be just, such as when Just Stop Oil scrawled orange graffiti on Charles Darwin’s grave. In America, and no doubt increasingly here too, activists also see regarding graffiti as vandalism as a form of unfair prejudice, even “racism”, because of graffiti’s associations with hip-hop culture. According to some theorists, graffiti is a perfectly legitimate response to silencing and oppression, a necessary rejoinder to gentrification or even “an act of resistance against the hierarchical high-end art world”.
On this subject, the debate about whether graffiti is not so much a symbol of societal decline as a form of art has been long-running. The Open University even runs an online course on it. Banksy, of course, is legendary and there are countless examples worldwide of impressive street art that enhance rather than degrade an area, brightening the day of anyone who passes by. To my eyes, for example, the North Beach Jazz Mural in San Francisco is indisputably art and a gorgeous fresco-style mural of Simone Martini’s “The Angel Gabriel” popped up on a wall in Fulham last year in conjunction with The National Gallery. But it would be facile to suggest that the average “tag”, mindlessly sprayed on to a train on the Bakerloo Line, has any serious aesthetic merit or cheering potential.
Thinking about the rise in graffiti on the Tube made me remember a recent hoo-ha when a “Professor of Social Mobility” suggested the government might, as part of its threatened curriculum review, send schoolchildren to graffiti workshops rather than “middle-class” theatres and museums. Plenty of people scoffed at the time, but a bit of googling reveals that companies offering graffiti workshops are numerous, long-established, and charging high fees to teach children how to spray a tag, a slogan or their favourite cartoon character on to a wall, and it’s all designed to tie in with projects already on the curriculum. These sessions are not always confined to the classroom or playground, but sometimes take place in public spaces.
When we fail to challenge anti-social behaviour, we implicitly authorise it
The arts are marginalised in most schools these days, and trips to cultural events are few and far between. It would be depressing to think that this might be the only “culture” some children are getting and even more depressing if some children are being given graffiti lessons because their schools perceive it to be the type of art most “relevant” to them. Schools’ outreach projects can have life-changing power. A school trip to see Opera North turned me into an opera enthusiast, and later an opera historian. Today, one of the Royal Ballet and Opera’s outreach projects is an interactive graffiti workshop. Perhaps this too will spark a passion, but to what end? Some such courses purport to explain to participants “why illegal graffiti is not a good route to choose in life”, but doesn’t this seem rather at odds with teaching young people the tricks of the trade?
If you tell children something is acceptable, they will see no reason to stop. Why should they? The teenagers blasting music out of their phones on public transport who look at you blankly if you object are of a generation whose parents used iPads as pacifiers on the train when they couldn’t be bothered to talk to them as toddlers. When we fail to challenge anti-social behaviour, we implicitly authorise it. And if children are told, in these days when individual freedom is celebrated above all else, that it’s acceptable to “express yourself” by spraying slogans onto walls without a care for what others might think, then why wouldn’t they continue doing so in adulthood? We reap what we sow.
