Is graffiti a form of text art?

Before I put down my thoughts on the subject maybe I’d better define what I think of as graffiti first.

Definitions are always a bit blurry round the edges, but as a rule I define graffiti as generally being the (usually) illegal application of a painted design to a public-facing surface that isn’t supposed to have such designs applied to it. Things like walls and underground trains. It’s usually applied furtively and quickly and as a deliberate act of defacement.

I’m not including permitted “street art” which is often applied to surfaces with permission and which can take a long time to execute, often with the artist who has created the work being clearly visible to the public while at work (and usually surrounded by an arsenal of spray cans in different colours).

In this definition of graffiti, people who create street art consider themselves as artists, while the producers of graffiti don’t consider themselves to be artists. Rebels maybe, artists no.

In the photo above the wall is covered in street art, not graffiti. The wall was specially constructed specifically for the purpose of having street art applied to it, which is about as un-graffiti as you can get. Maybe the tags down the left-hand end of the wall are graffiti, applied by apprentice rebels before they graduate to targeting walls that they shouldn’t. The text in the street art section (which I think can safely be called text-based art) is styled in traditional street art/graffiti typography. The photo, by the way, shows a welcome example of a female street artist.

Graffiti usually comes in the form of text or text-like shapes. Occasionally it has a pictorial element to it – penises are a common feature, which may be a clue to the preoccupations and demographic of the people who usually produce graffiti.

The statistically not insignificant number of penises that appear in graffiti are a good indicator of the subversive nature of graffiti. Generally speaking there are very few penises on display in public spaces although they are quite common in art galleries (which are obviously public spaces themselves, but ones that are cordoned off from accidental viewing). The only penises that come to mind that you may encounter on the street are those of Antony Gromley in his sculptures, which seem to have escaped from the art galleries.

So, using my definition of graffiti, is graffiti a form of text-based art? It’s usually text-based, but is it art?

I suppose you need to define art.

One definition is that art is what is created by artists. That sounds a bit too tautological for my liking.

What about trying the definition that art is what is created with the specific intention of it being art, whether the creator considers themself an artist or not? I think that may be better, as it defines the art first, not in terms of the person who created it.

Using that definition a person who produces graffiti and who doesn’t think that that graffiti is art isn’t producing art, they are just producing a territorial marker or whatever.

However, graffiti is deliberately created to express something, otherwise its creator wouldn’t have bothered creating it, and that sounds very much like one of the definitions of art to me, so maybe the creators of graffiti are actually artists even though they wouldn’t use the term themselves.

The definitions are all very slippery.

Maybe just because graffiti isn’t particularly well executed (especially in its more basic and vandalistic form) doesn’t exclude graffiti from being art, it just makes it not very good art.

Maybe it’s a form of low art, and maybe it’s below the level at which it’s practical to call it art, because if you call all human creative activity art then practically everything that people do can be defined as art and the term becomes meaningless.

Bearing in mind that some text-based art is very crudely executed however, the act of defining anything is a thankless task.