Grafitti

What is Graffiti?

Is graffiti  a form of art or simply a tag?

Graffiti first got its name in the 1960's when people started to "tag" their names. Before this decade it was common for political activists to use and even gangs.In the 1960's it led to people trying to get as many tags as possible and as large as possible.

Why are people tagging things with their name? (I don't know about you, but this made no sense to me at first)

To get their name out there, to let it be known they are there. To tag over someones "signature" is form of disrespect. If a person in a gang did this to another gang, those gangs might not get along...
To identify a tag normally there will be one color and it will be simple with not many dimensions

This tagging led to competition, which = more tagging.
UGA was formed, United Graffiti Artists. This led to more mural style paintings where artists could take their time to form a  larger piece of art which wasn't just a tag.

The next type of graffiti to develop then was bombing in the decade of the 70's.
New York was in a huge money problem and so was the rest of the U.S. Lets just say the officials main concern was not graffiti.

Bombing was a mural style of graffiti in which whole sides of subway cars could be filled with paint.
**When I was younger I remember thinking the paintings on the side of train cars were so neat looking, this was a bombing style of graffiti**

The use of bombing graffiti would not slow down until the 80's. This decline was because officials began to take notice and made places to graffiti less accessible. Only the best and most talented survived.

        One of the ways officials did this was through the use of laws which made buying spray paint at a                 certain age more difficult and regulated how much you bought.

While this made the art of graffiti for the most fit. It also made it a more aggressive form of art. Especially in gangs. Certain pieces of land or space to paint was considered to "belong" to certain gangs.

That is the beginning of graffiti history. There is obviously much more afte rthis point, but we won't be covering that.

How do you view modern graffiti today?

I see it as an art form and I love when in parks and recreational zones they put a graffiti mural.
Here is an example from my hometown in Sioux City, Iowa