Should we be doing this?

Is it okay to create illegal public art at all? Can you be acting ethically if you're altering someone else's stuff without their permission? From drippy marker tags on New York trains to Brazilian pichação to "okupa y resiste" on a Spanish streetcorner to wildstyle burners in South Africa to Banksy's "One Nation Under CCTV" piece in London, no one asked the property owners for permission. Nobody asked the people passing by if they wanted to look at something new. Acting so rashly--how could it be right?

The new McDonalds in your city, the one running on factory farms that keep animals drugged in minuscule cages for their entire lives--were you asked if they could decorate your skyline with their golden arches? And Coca-Cola--the same Coca-Cola that has employed paramilitary groups to murder and torture Colombian workers to break up their union--did they ask you before taking up a patch of your commute bigger than your front yard with one of their advertisements?

"But they paid for those ads!"

Is legitimacy something you can get by paying for it? Does a clothing ad, encouraging us towards wildly unhealthy ideals of beauty, have more right to exist than an insightful political commentary sprayed on a wall, simply because it cost more to put there? How many people do you know who have something to say? And how many of them can afford renting a 12' by 24' billboard? Or printing costs for a national poster campaign? Perhaps they could afford ad space in some magazines? They can't? Oh. So should they just hold it until they're advertising executives? Keep hoping that book deal works out? Wait to make their point until they're in the year's best-selling band? Hope their rich relatives die soon? This is an important idea they want to get across, you know.

"Come on now, there are plenty of societally accepted ways to make your point. You can write letters to the editor, you can play music at open-mic nights--hey, you can blog about it!"

All those things are important--I wouldn't be writing this if I believed differently--but there are two caveats. First, the number of people who might hear you sing a song at a coffee shop is significantly smaller than the number of people who might see it if you stenciled a reproduction of the news frame of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein at twice-life-size on the side of a building downtown. Second, you grant legitimacy to the system in conforming to its (double) standard. So if you've got something you feel should be said, I honestly and heartily urge you to write letters to the editors of every newspaper you can find, and start a blog! It's free, and so long as you don't say the wrong thing, it's legal. But if you really want people to hear you, you might also look into a roller and some paint.

We live in deeply flawed societies, all around the world. Our governments are often unjust and their laws unfair. Each person is not accorded the same respect and power as every other. And that being the case, I believe that if the poor and the otherwise disenfranchised (and disenfranchisement doesn't take much) have a message to communicate, they should freely take that communication into their own hands. Should Banksy, deeply dissatisfied with the surveillance state the government of England is creating, limit himself to the channels that same government provides its citizens to communicate his statements of anger?

What if they're just tagging, hitting up streetsigns and the backs of trucks with a broad-tip marker, leaving a name and nothing else? I still say it's valid--I'm much more comfortable with a statement of one's own presence, one's own sense of style, and one's dissatisfaction with a poorly-functioning society than I am with a manipulative bid to get someone to buy something they don't need, further filling the pockets of the rich. And I do feel that tagging does indeed serve to critique the social codes we live with, even if the writer doesn't intend it to, as breaking those codes implicitly argues against them.

"But it's on someone else's property."

This is true. There are priority mail stickers with the names of local writers up on lightposts in the city where I live. Those lightposts probably belong to the city, as a legal entity. There are spray pieces in alleyways throughout much of the downtown. The buildings whose backs and sides make up the alley walls are owned by people. Probably not people who run any of the several businesses in each building, and certainly not people who actually spend time in the alley, but people. There are tags in bus shelters around my city. Those bus shelters are probably owned by the transit authority. I hold that none of these people, be they individuals or corporations, are having any of their truly personal property altered when people create street art. If someone were to come paint a burner on your house, it would be different--your home is definitely yours, it is not public. But these other places--the vast majority of the places graffiti is found--are not held personally precious by their owners. Often, they are owned not by individuals at all, but by large groups. They are spaces occupied by the public--by all of us. And as you personally should have control over what your own home looks like, shouldn't we all have a say in what our public environments look like? I return to an earlier style of question: did the transit authority ask me what I wanted bus shelters to look like? If they had, things would look a lot different.

There are gray areas--When does property become too personal to create art on? What about public buildings that were constructed to be art in and of themselves?--and I'll get into those things in the future. But there are also other situations, situations where no individual person has any of their personal property damaged at all, and where no aesthetic effort whatsoever went into creating major elements of the built environments we occupy every day. That's the majority of what we live in. And in those situations, I say the walls are ours.

When we live in an equal society--when women do not make up just 2% of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, when affirmative action is no longer necessary because we have eliminated institutionalized racism and classism, when poor youth are not deceived into joining militaries that will abuse their ill-gained trust and kill them, and when Jesse Average can communicate as freely and easily as the richest of the rich--then I may be more open to arguments for a system that bars people from expressing themselves on other people's property without asking. But not until.

More to come.