The Writing on the Wall

There is a view that graffiti are an art form, a form of social protest, the assertion of involvment and ownership over city buildings by the propertyless, a communication system between street gangs, a means of demarking territories, a taking possession of an environment that alienates the writers, and the highest form of expression of their values and beliefs that the writers can achieve, thus to be valued as such.

It may be that some environments do cry out for such response, soul- destroying in their ugly oppressiveness. It may be that the expression of emotion through visual elaboration is to be considered with eyes that value relative not absolute achievment. Should the writing of graffiti on surfaces that are themselves parts of art works be judged more harshly than the wholesale destruction of war?

But if the choices made by graffiti writers in: covering Brunelleschi’s magnificent Rotunda in all its golden stone glory, in a black statement of anarchy’s triumph; tagging Ammannati’s great palazzi lining via degli Alfani, altering for ever their age -acquired patinas of stone and intonaco; writing on every great, two storey high courtyard gates that open from the Borgo Pinti into gardens and terraces that delight the eye as it gazes in from the curving stone street, are their comment on the work of the artists and craftsmen that made this all -of- a -piece vision of renaissance harmony, they should be struck dumb, or preferably, dead.