Nice article Will. Urban Art has to be documented quickly as sadly the tagger come in and muck it up quickly.

That’s the problem with graffiti, it caters to a wide segment of the population, thus the vast variety of forms. It’s also the good thing about graffiti, my East LA arse never met/befriended so many white/middle class people until I went to graf/hip hop events.

You can tell in the “after” pic that all the extra tagging was done by kids or someone inexperienced in the medium. More experienced folks generally learn the rules of the game, like not burning a good piece with your chickenscratch bullshit. Unfortunately graffiti speaks to a lot of young, dysfunctional kids who are assholes, and beging tagging everything around (including other better looking graffiti pieces and murals) them like a dog pissing on everything (to quote pete) to mark it’s territory. Way back when I moved back to LA and was making the transition from ex-writer to artist/daddy, I would still come in contact with a lot of these jerkoffs thru friends and family events and hear about how they were tagging murals (at the time it was becoming the thing to do). Luckily for me I come off as more of a stocky cholo than a shriveled up tagger, so I called a lot of people bitches and made a lot of threats. A lot of my finest work has been ruined by some dipshit who picked up a can last night to fill the void no papa left. The worst part is when I engaged in graf I never touched others’ art and even most private property, it was a long time ago.

Os Gemeos are 2 wealthy twins from Sao Paolo, Brazil. The kids tagging the other shite are probably mexican 14 year olds without the balls to join EP 13 or some other gang.

Unfortunately, it seems like those in graffiti who come from priveleged backgrounds (and are usually white) are the only ones transitioning into legitimate art. This underscores the need for more art programs and ways for the hood/brown kids to move up the ladder from assholedom, but instead they catch jail records and eventually devolve into cholos living in mom’s garage. Lurker in LA weekly is a good example of only considering the rich white kids’ stuff “art” while ignroing the ghetto brown kids who make up 85% of the real graffit scene, and have just as much talent.