Roberto Bedoya may be the nicest guy in the whole wide world. I don’t know him personally but I have heard nice things about him. One thing I am pretty sure about is that he probably has brown eyes because—on one major topic, at least—he’s full of crap all the way up to here. (I’m holding my palm, fingers out, up to my forehead. It’s a universally accepted form of artistic expression.)
In a recent op-ed in the morning paper, Mr. Bedoya, who is the head of the Tucson Pima Arts Council, briefly decried the vulgar vandalism that struck the historic Fox Theater downtown.
Then he spent the rest of the piece whining the all-too-familiar lament, “Oh, poor babies, what has society done to make them lash out this way?” The only thing society has done wrong in this case is to give knuckleheads easy access to spray paint.
I hate the contention that taggers are just frustrated artists trying to express themselves. What they really are is punks and bitches who can’t hang. Sometimes, art isn’t even art. But graffiti is NEVER art. Never. No time. Not under any circumstances. Never, ever, ever.
I’m not an art Luddite. I once got three of the five questions correct on an “Art” category in Double Jeopardy. (Yeah, DOUBLE Jeopardy!) I know the difference between Manet and Monet. Edourd Manet straddled the transition between realism and impressionism. Perhaps his most famous painting is Luncheon on the Grass, which features two guys fully dressed in formal suits sitting on a blanket with a woman who is totally naked. (There’s a basket of fruit and bread in the foreground so it’s not a completely dirty picture.)
I also liked Manet’s painting Dead Matador, which shows, you know, a dead matador. It looks like something Norman Rockwell would have done if he had taken too much NyQuil.
Claude Monet was also an impressionist and was a contemporary and friend of Manet’s. Monet is famous for painting water lilies. Monet and I share a birthday. I tried to use water lilies as a mnemonic device to help me tell the two apart, but I’ve never known anybody named Lily and water is too general a topic to do me any good. What I settled on is that Monet did a copycat painting called Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), but in his, the woman on the blanket is fully clothed. So, since M-o comes after M-a, that’s how I tell them apart.
Bedoya wrote, “Is it possible to condemn vandalism and still listen to the message it sends?” No, because the only message it sends is “I’m a jerk and I don’t care about anybody else.” And who wants to listen to that message?
I have to be clear here. I’m not talking about giant murals that are painted on walls with the owner’s express permission, murals that all appear to be derivative of the cover of the first Malo album (the one with “Suavecito” on it). I’ll admit that I would be far more likely to steer my car into a self-serve car wash that has a giant painting of a curvaceous Aztec princess on it than one that doesn’t. But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? We’re talking about a burnout with pants that sag because he’s got no butt to hold them up writing in big fat letters a nickname that he gave himself.
Do you know how lame it is to give oneself a nickname?
There is always the possibility that Mr. Bedoya was attempting the journalistic equivalent to the sketch that Buck Henry did in the early days of “Saturday Night Live.” Henry was playing a talk-radio guy who starts off his show by saying, “Today we’ll be discussing the upcoming municipal bond election. Give us a call and tell me what you think.”
There’s this long, painful period of silence as Henry stares in anticipation at the empty switchboard. Finally, he says, “Okay, we’ll widen the discussion to include the races for city council and the mayor’s office.” Again, nothing. Then he says, “Okay, what do you think about the race for governor?” More silence as he checks to make sure that the phones are working. Henry milked the silence for all it was worth. Each time it lasted longer than the time before and the painful silence squeezed uncomfortable laughter out of the audience members.
He kept expanding the list of potential targets as his frustration and flop sweat grew exponentially. Finally, he screams into the mic, “I think that all Catholic nuns are Communist prostitutes! What do you think about that?!”
Maybe Bedoya was just trying to stir up some controversy with his article. Let the columnist who has never entertained the thought “Wow, let’s see how much hate mail I can generate with this one” cast the first stone. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think he really wants us to look past the defacing and destruction of private and public property and see some tortured soul.
Nope, can’t do it. It’s a pathetic contention, one that serves only the criminal. Art can be important to a community and should be nurtured. Graffiti is a blight and a crime and needs to be stamped out. Hard.
This article appears in May 21-27, 2015.
Thank you Tom. Well said. I did not hear an ounce of pity for the gang members shot and killed by police in Waco.
Unlike Baltimore where every possible excuse was made for the actions of those criminals.
Lawbreakers are lawbreakers.
Are ancient petroglyphs graffiti? The romans had to put up with graffiti, too. There always has been, and always will be, graffiti. You can fight it with technology by creating anti-graffiti surfaces. You can fight it by criminalizing it and punishing the few that are caught. You can try a type of non-smoking campaign (warning labels on spray paint?). But there is still going to be some idiot out there with a brain the size of the ball bearing in the paint can who just doesn’t give a damn. I read a science fiction novel about an escalating “war” between graffiti artists and the phone company where the artists added a low grade flu virus to the graffiti paint on a pay phone so that anybody using the phone would contract the flu. The telephone company reacted by creating a pay phone that periodically cleaned itself like an oven by heating up to a few thousand degrees that burned off anything painted or applied to it. Do you think that stopped the graffiti artists?
These taggers are nothing but a bunch of sleazy roaches that come out at night and should be treated as such. If cought exterminated.
No complaints here about your comments, Tom. Graffiti is a blight-it is not art to deface a public property just because you feel a need to express your poor self.
I’ve always considered taggers to be a bunch of dogs pissing to mark their property, except these assholes don’t mark their property – they mark any one else’s
As a former art professor of 25 years and continuing studio artist, my opinions about graffiti have evolved over the years. Early, as a youthful artist I loved it for it’s freedom of expression and probably because I was too poor to own anything significant enough to be tagged. Graffiti writers take great risks while defacing the property of others. A young art student where I used to teach was tagging a boxcar on a train when the train started to move, she fell off the car, on the tracks and the train amputated her leg. A harsh and permanent punishment for her actions. I cannot look at graffiti on a train without thinking of her. File it under smart people doing stupid things.
As Kentop stated , ancient petroglyphs, pictographs, sacred burial mounds, and other statements from antiquity now considered part of our cultural heritage, are equivalent to the primal urge to express ones self. I blister when I see bullet holes, or “Bob loves Mary” scratched over ancient petroglyphs. Yet isn’t that expression the same if undeniably less significant? When I saw the news of the graffiti of the Fox Theatre, I was disgusted. Such a beautiful, historic facade that contributes so wonderfully to this community and the aesthetics of downtown Tucson. Policing graffiti is nearly impossible and will happen in some form or another as long as humans have free will and the urge to express it. Call it good, bad, art, garbage it will sustain. The positive notion about the Fox is that the facade is mostly ceramic tile which cleans up easier than some materials except for the grout. Ceramic facades and generally architecture is a more substantial form of artistic expression as the rapid cleanup demonstrated.
The late artist Keith Haring started as a graffiti artist in the New York subway tunnels, and graduated to the galleries where he received broad and even commercial success. You can get a coffee mug with his imagery. I am not sure if he evolved, but the public’s perception, as well as the art world’s perception of his work evolved greatly.
Danehy’s essay woefully misses the point as criticizing graffiti writers and the pathetic Pima County Arts Council are easy targets that most will agree upon. Too bad he never mentioned the generous contractor who rapidly volunteered to clean up the repugnant graffiti…gratis from what I hear. That’s where the story lies. Once again in our culture the worst brings out the best, and Danehy missed a golden opportunity to point that out.
Another point missed is what I call corporate graffiti. Our streets and highways are littered with inane billboards and advertisements that in my mind are equally offensive compromising one of the most visually beautiful landscapes anywhere …yet we take them for granted.
Graffiti is not a historical cultural display of any people. It is not art, it is a form of communication, a primitive one. My belief is that graffiti has a closer relationship with terrorism than with art. Why? The message it sends is most often a threat, or a will to intimidate or incite, free speech? OK but you cannot use other peoples property for your message and if your message is to claim territory or to incite violence or send a threat, that needs to be punished as terrorism.
Nobody mentions the fact that you can go to Target right now & find graffiti used as a marketing tool. The youth watches videos with Graff in background, video games etc marketing graffiti to their target market. Graffiti is art when given permission & vandalism when not given permission. There is no guidance, no mentorship. Art is CULTURE. We can’t control all things and even less with a budget cut to the Arts.
Graffiti is more about alienation. Most younger folk feel alienated. They believe that they do not fit into “society”. They’ve been told since birth that they are special. So, they learn that they are not only not special, but unwanted. They want to communicate to others of their ilk. They communicate to the “others” using graffiti, and the “others” respond. Would you “follow the rules” of your society if you felt alienated from that same society? Do you romanticize your predicament the way all adolescents do? Here’s a spray paint can. Nobody’s looking. Express yourself. Turn your weakness into a strength.
Stop it kentop you’re making me dizzy. Special/unwanted? How about loved? Sounds like the same problems we have with parents in the public schools.
Time for a little religion? heckya!
I agree. It seems like Mr. Bedoya is right up there with the patron saint of local grafitti scofflaws, Ward 1 Councilwoman Regina Romero.
Clean up our city. Better yet make them.
When the persons responsible are caught and identified and found guilty, then as punishment, spray paint each and every possession they own, down to their socks. That would include their house, their car…etc..
I’d like to add one more possession to Timmothy’s list. Their tonsils !
Damn, just when I am about to give up and think that all common sense is gone, you write this little jewel.
Maybe we are not polar opposites. maybe you are only wrong most of the time.
Thanks for skipping the grey area b.s. and calling it like it is concerning punk behavior.
I personally love certain forms of graffiti. Ugly boxcars emblazoned only with a corporate logo are beautified by gigantic pieces thrown up by future legitimized graffiti artists. The concrete drainage tunnels and wash beds, nearly invisible to the public eye, full of rich graffiti pieces are neat to look at and admire. Heck, back in the day Tucson has a graffiti alley downtown, it was a stinking gross alley abd the graffiti art did make it much more pleasant.
The problem isn’t using ugly garish spaces to make public art without permission. As pointed out corporations have the luxury of wealth to pay to put up ugly garish messages in our communities without our real consent too.
The problem is the destruction of community and private property in inappropriate spaces. Tagging. It’s not the same. It’s meant to deface and destruct property to show off one’s name as an act of intimidation and street cred. Idiot kids tagged in the back walls of residencies in my neighborhood. Not alley walls but park facing or street facing walls for years I’ve had to look at these dumb kids ugly tags. They couldn’t even be troubled to be slightly skilful. I don’t feelbad for these kids. I understand where they’re coming from and I realize obviously they’ll likely grow out of it. I don’t support the criminalizing and punishing everything zero tolerance society. But the jerk that defaced the Fox Theater did so it off a desire to show off and deserves a fitting consequence, cleaning up my neighborhoods ugly tagging, and all the others is totally just.
Rat T, the situation in Waco was caused by an ex-San Antonio cop whose actions during an encounter sparked mayhem-sounds a lot like Baltimore save the “ex” part. Also, while I agree that graffiti is, in this case, an act of vandalism, I must ask in light of your “time for a little religion? heckya!” comment a.) How you know the tagger lacks a religious background and b.) if you’d have felt better had the Fox been tagged with a Virgen de Guadalupe?
Graffiti and Tagging are two very different things. Graffiti = pretty, Tagging = bullshit. Please do your research and educate yourself on the differences.
OK Moo….I’ll be over today to graffiti something “pretty” on your house.