ABSTRACT
Denver graffiti exists as an artifact of two collective enterprises. Working within an evolving subculture, Denver writers draw on shared resources of imagery and style in producing moments of illicit creativity, and tags, throw-ups, and murals which are their result. At the same time, Denver’s moral entrepreneurs work to construct this graffiti writing as crime, and to engineer the sort of moral panic which will sustain their undertaking. Graffiti writing and the campaign against it also incorporate issues of authority and power, subordination and insubordination, and therefore together suggest a sort of analytic approach which might be labeled “anarchist criminology.” The details of the Denver graffiti scene show that writers construct graffiti and its meaning out of this blend of subcultural history and situational immediacy. A close examination of graffiti writing, then, reveals it to be a crime of style, grounded in the shared aesthetic resources of the writers.
