Tag This - The Pics

After I saw a tweet asking whether tagging could be considered art, I wondered whether the author lived in a neighbourhood covered in it.  Sure I've seen a few creative stencils appear on my garage door, but most of the time the taggers seem to be interested only in hitting every surface until they run out of paint.  And no, that's not your territory you're marking like a dog, that's my private property.

Also it irks me to not be able to walk more than a few feet in any direction without running into this stuff.  I remember the first time I went to New York in the mid 80s.  Times Square was till a druggie nightmare, but they had started cleaning up the subway cars. At the time I was sorely disappointed not to see the rolling canvases immortalized in70s  tv and movies, like Welcome Back Kotter or The Warriors. (When the film got turned into a video game, it was publicized with...graffiti.) Still I appreciated the concept of cleaning up your backyard to improve morale and try to bring down the crime rate by looking like someone gave a damn. Now I'm the ornery property owner.

So, here is a quick tour of College St, between Spadina and Bathurst, with a short detour down a typical alleyway.  I have selected a representational sample meant to show what types of surfaces are tagged; this is only a fraction of the actual paint out there....

street sign poles

backs of street signs

garbage bins

traffic stanchions

traffic light poles

buildings that have already been repainted multiple times

news boxes

glass doors

glass brick

parking meters

security coverings

directories

plastic damaged from trying to clean off previous graffiti

benches

scratched into windows

utility poles

utility boxes

tops of buildings, including those under construction

skinny poles

fat poles

fronts of street signs

bike racks (covered illegally but aesthetically in blue paint)

this is what happens when they don't teach cursive in school

non-Bell phone booth

sides of houses

hoarding

no, I don't live in a ghetto - it's just Kensington Market

church benches

apparently small children, or possibly dogs, are getting involved

mail boxes

fences

trash cans

someone has a sick sense of humour

trees.  TREES!

papered-over failed businesses

transit shelters

pipes (note how they complement the lovely poster-shred-covered utility pole?)

construction signs

Poop Machine

graffiti on graffiti

height no problem

more graffiti on graffiti crime

even nice pictures aren't immune

this is more typical of the garage doors around here

graffiti might actually be an improvement here

even residential cable boxes aren't safe

traffic-calming flower boxes

 
In the end, the residents' association told me the solution is to clean off your own property as soon as possible (done and done) and to rat out the shop owners who can't be bother to clean up within 24 hrs.  Fine - but there are so many and who's really going to enforce it?  It would be easier for an enforcement officer to talk a quick walk like I did.

So, is it an urban scourge, or am I lucky to be in the middle of a "street art" gallery?

Next time: my rebuttal of the pro-tagging article....