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Dating back in historical record as far as the Catacombs of the Roman Empire, graffiti can be defined as the act of vandalizing another’s property, whether it is public or private.

 

Unlike other forms of art, graffiti is inherently illegal. Due to its illegality, graffiti artists generally operate under anonymous names. So is graffiti truly art, or merely an act a malicious transgression of property? I will consider some tropes of graffiti across history in hopes of demonstrating that it is an amorphic yet legitimate art form.

Due to its transgressive nature, graffiti is must necessarily be quite political and self-conscious – graffiti’s creators are aware they are defying the law – this reflexivity is always a part of their message.

Hence, political caricatures in Roman times

or Banksy’s contemporary work

 

Yet this leads to the question, is all graffiti automatically artistic simply due to its controversial nature? Does an ill-thought out or perverse image

 

constitute street art?

Jean Baudrillard notes graffiti’s transgressive nature marks it as a powerful means of communication because it destabilizes the message of the property it has vandalized. For example, the Catacombs or the wall pictured above no longer command as much attention as the piece that has covered them.

 

In this sense, I would argue that although all works of graffiti serve to destabilize traditional meaning, and is therefore political, only some works of graffiti make an attempt to transpose new meaning in place of what it has destroyed. Banksy’s graffiti

works to destabilize an ordinary wall, distract from typical urban signage, but also through self-aware parody of commercial signage, actively disrupt and dispute the coherence of the commercial logic the city block attempts to fabricate. The above piece makes a powerful statement about commercialization of art – we are commodifying freedom through habits of consumption rather than thinking and acting freely.

Banksy’s work is an attempt to introduce decidedly new ways of thinking, grant the “audience” of his work agency. Ultimately, the physical demonstration of agency – the ability to transgress and defy rules of law – offer the audience the same agency to think outside the bounds of what society tells us to.

Looking for a nice study break? Creators Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld (a married couple with considerable talents) bring you High Maintenance, a web series based on a character known only as “The Guy,” who delivers weed to customers in New York City on his bike. There is no extended plot between the episodes, and each stands alone as an individual entity. There is some repetition in characters, but for the most part all of the conflict and resolution happen within each episode. The plot is actually secondary to the web series’ magic; the key resides in the characters. Each episode focuses on the client, not The Guy, and we see an acutely accurate representation of different people in the city. The characters are believable, familiar, substantial, relatable and amusing. They are the unbearably annoying friends, the scrambling for rent so they turn to subletting their spare room, the overworked and anxious assistant. But each comes with an added surprise: the stay at home dad likes to cross-dress; the man who orders weed every week has a secret crush on The Guy; the amazing new girlfriend is actually homeless. As the new character information appears, so too does our interest and investment peak. These are really high quality videos with superb editing, wonderful character development, astonishing visuals of the city, and a hilarious, heart-warming main character. The ultimate allure to this series is that we grow to love and admire The Guy, a drug dealer with a clear conscious, true morals (that may or may not align with the law) and a big heart. Watch a few below and see the rest for yourselves!

 

It is really easy to be drowned by noise these days. But when everything just shuts the fuck up for a second, you quickly revert to a primal state, where deeply hidden feelings start to resurface. Now, the exact psychology of that, or what I am about to talk about, is a mystery to me, but it is, needless to say, important to me.

How I will get to start to talk about choice is a mystery to me, so I will provide this non sequitur to bring about this post to what I think is one of the most profound and beautiful things about human existence – choice. But my interest lies not in the creations that mankind has made due to the power of choices, but rather, my concern lies within the realms of far more general observations.
These thoughts that I dawned upon recently, came when I was watching, or rather listening to an interview that Philip Seymour Hoffman did on the subject of happiness. At first I thought about whether or not I was happy at this point in my life. However, I quickly realized I wasn’t and moved on, figuring that lingering on such a detail would amount to nothing. But what peaked my curiosity was Hoffman’s death, how he died of a heroin overdose. It is easy to say that such brilliant individuals, and especially actors, succumb to such addictions all the time – a very submissive view towards clichés. However, this removes a lot of the mysteries that are so interesting. What if (of course I cannot say this is true, it is only a hypothetical situation), that Hoffman became addicted to heroin, not because he was a walking cliché of ‘artist depression’, but rather, because of rotten luck? Such a ridiculous hypothetical perhaps suggests the nonexistence of a mystery instead of a perpetuation of one, but then came the question: then how much of our death is choice? How much of our lives revolve around choice? If there is this mystery of chance, of some absolute randomized power that is far beyond our intelligence, then what does choice matter? If we decide to chase after this elusive property of the universe, if we decide to pursue the ‘big questions of life’, then what does it matter what choice we have, if all it leads down to is the absolute – that we will never know?

But I think it is in this very conundrum that choice finds its beauty. We can choose what grants us satisfaction or what we want to grant the power of importance to in our lives. We can let all the unanswerable enigmatic questions leave our faculties, queries which we cannot even begin to understand in the first place, and focus on what makes us happy in each of the individual moments that riddle our lives. A sort of mental relaxation that is paradoxically taxingly active. Perhaps I was watching a movie, saw a child help another child that fell, was just looking at the ocean and a couple of birds tussling for a crab, or watching a dog nap away on the front lawn of a house I walked by. These ephemeral moments of happiness are incredible, because they are so fleeting. Then if it is so fleeting, is my happiness from those moments fleeting as well? I don’t think so. I think we have the ability to hold onto things that are inherently ephemeral. Also, if anything, I find that if you just calm down for a second, these moments come to you more often than you would think. But I think learning to appreciate these small moments of emotional victory, also leads you to an awareness of the beauty found in our saddest moments.
But of course there is the absolute that unifies us all: death. But if we had that, and the knowledge of the universe, the answer to the question, I don’t suppose our lives would be very interesting. In fact, I have to imagine that God is bored – most of the time. I sort of imagine an old man who fell asleep on the couch with the TV on – subconsciously listening to a bunch of white noise. Yet, I don’t think we were ever meant to think in absolutes. It is certainly easy (but at the same time, not really) to think in black and white. But absolutes are terrifying, because we not only accept them easily, but there is an indeterminable power that forces us into believing that they corner us. We are slaves to them essentially, and the ability to understand them is sometimes refused by the very entity that we consider being so specific a law of the universe. We feel the power of its effect, yet its definition eludes us. That is why perhaps when we are robbed of choice by the power of absolutes, we feel cheated, and more importantly in distress.
Perhaps thinking in conjunction with other elements can help dwindle this fact. To consider how nothing exists in isolation in this world. If you successfully understand death, and accept it as something that inevitably happens, you can finally live, because life is invariably connected to death.
I am not saying any of this is easy. By no means do I think that such exercises in conscious choice can be done on such a whim. But I think just the act of thinking of greying what we once considered black and white can help us not so much understand the world more, but enjoy what little we grasp of it. I mean this entire post is an exercise in choice. I am not at all nearer to happiness, but I do feel a sort of energy.
The fact that we as humans have such intellectual liberties is ridiculously beautiful. So why not exercise it more – even if it brings us to dark places, or just makes realize that we have been in the corner the whole time.

People always describe me as bitter and I am not ashamed of that. Bitterness is my motivation. When a person gets confronted by a difficult situation, they become dejected for a time; when they are constantly in this situation, they can become many things: depressed, angry, or shielded amongst others; and finally when one is consistently rejected when they try to fix this situation, then they become bitter. I know what bitterness is because I constantly am in this state. There are so many things in society that are harsh and I can’t ignore them, yet I can’t fix them.

This may sound like I hate it, but I like it. Being bitter makes me realize that society needs to be fixed, even though I can’t do it by myself. On the other hand, I don’t want someone to become who I have become. These two factors cause bitterness to be my motivation. I know that I must do something in order to improve how fucked up society can be. I work, even though I can’t improve my own situation, I work because I want to improve the situations of those that come after me. We currently walk on uneven ground and it is at our behest to look below us to see the path that the past has started for us. They worked hard for us to start this and we must work just as hard in order to improve it. We must stamp it out and flatten so that the ones after us don’t have to trip as hard or as often as we do. I’m not talking about one specific community here. All of us downtrodden and underprivileged should be doing this work. It can be hard and trying, but I don’t want to lead someone down a path that I refused to improve and if I must, I want to carry as many as possible as I can while I walk.

I see my friends in similar situations and I see their optimism and brightness. I not want them to fall and walk this path. I may be happy being bitter and making these improvements, but I know how much nicer it is to be oblivious of the harshness. I want them to be able to live their lives fully and I’m not sure I ever can with this rage that I have. I want to be bitter so that I can see what parts need to be levelled, but I don’t want other to have to experiences the lumps and the painful trips they cause. I have been lucky and my trips have been mostly soft, but even those have lasting effects. I do not want others to go through that, or, even worse, fall harder than I have. I want my friends to not have to walk on this exhausting path and I don’t want the people behind me to walk it either; I want to fix it as much as I can while I’m here.

For those who have already fallen to the path, please help lift up those we can protect and even out the ground for those that come after us. We can’t all do it right now, but at least make it easier and better. We can’t refuse this call to duty, lest we fail those that count on us the most. You can remain bitter and wear that as a badge of pride. Work with me and fix what we see needs to be fixed while we are here.