ABSTRACT
So, there are writers and artists, and there are cops. And the good guys and the bad guys are locked in a battle over who has the ‘right to write’ on urban surfaces. Right?
Well, not quite. If your city is anything like mine (Sydney), the battle over graffiti on your streets now involves an ever-widening range of actors – the planners who (try to) regulate the uses of urban space, the politicians who make the criminal laws, the mainstream media who support the crime-fighting efforts, the government-funded youth centres who run the graffiti workshops, the galleries who put on ‘urban art’ shows, the companies who manufacture the paint and sponsor the shows, the publishers who make the glossy books and magazines, the shops that sell the books and the prints and the paints and the markers, the writers and artists who get the sponsorship and do the commissions and the shows, the writers who bomb the hell out of their neighbourhoods and think art is for ‘fags’, the anti-graffiti enterprises selling technological ‘solutions’ to the graffiti problem, the property owners who hate graffiti and those who want (some form of) it, and so on and so forth.
