Just hours after our story on the city’s graffiti crackdown hit the stands, I get a response from local graffiti artist Sheepman to a few questions I’d sent him earlier this week.
In response to “Graffiti is not an issue of creativity, but a definite form of vandalism” : Obviously a mayor can’t say that “vandalism isn’t a problem if it is aesthetically pleasing.” He wouldn’t be doing his job. The law says that vandalism is vandalism, creativity doesn’t matter.
Graffiti artists don’t always consider what they do to be malicious defacement, this makes them out to have evil motives. Defacement is an opinion as graffiti doesn’t always spoil the surface, to many it enhances a surface. I don’t always like graffiti myself. Sometimes I think that people put stuff up just because they can or they’re trying to prove something. I like graffiti if I think it looks good, or if it’s in a spot that makes you wonder “how the hell did someone get up there to do that?”
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