ABSTRACT
Modern graffiti have become an unavoidable visual element of the urban landscape in nearly every city around the world. 1 If you live in an urban center, you likely see a great deal of graffiti around your city’s alleyways, underpasses, and transit lines. Maybe you even recognize the recurrent appearance of certain graffiti writers’ pseudonyms or “tags.” If you travel, perhaps you notice the unique styles of street art particular to different geographic regions. In many ways, graffiti are the illustrations in the story of a city. When graffiti artists choose to make the move from creating graffiti in the street to creating graffiti-style work in the gallery, however, the meaning and experience of the work changes. For example, imagine “burners” from a subway train transported to a gallery: static in a clinical environment. In other words, when modern graffiti are recontextualized from a free, public setting to a private, institutional space, such as a gallery or museum, which is inextricably connected to established systems of regulation and valuation, graffiti cease to function as a democratizing means of communication, and instead become part of a dialogue that has historically privileged certain voices while excluding others.
