Graffiti:
Writing on the Wall

Writing names on public surfaces — tags, markers, inscriptions — is as old as human beings writing. American graffiti writing as a distinct youth culture emerged in Philadelphia and New York in the late 1960s. Cornbread in Philadelphia was writing his name on walls in the late 1960s to get the attention of a girl; he is sometimes credited as the first. In New York, it was TAKI 183 — a teenage messenger from Washington Heights who wrote his nickname and street number on subway cars, buses, and walls across the city — who caught the mainstream's attention when the New York Times profiled him in 1971.

TAKI 183 was Greek-American, but the writing culture he helped spark was overwhelmingly Black and Latino — young people from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and upper Manhattan who were living in the same burned-out, abandoned urban landscape that would produce hip-hop two years later. The tag — your name, written large, written everywhere — was the simplest possible assertion of existence: I am here. I have been here. You cannot make me invisible. In a city that had declared their neighborhoods expendable, the writers declared their presence on every surface the city owned.

The New York Times article had the opposite of its intended effect. Instead of discrediting the activity, it publicized it. Within months, dozens of new writers appeared. The competition to be seen — to have your name in more places, on more trains, in larger and more elaborate letters — accelerated. The tag was the seed of a visual arms race that would produce, within three years, some of the most sophisticated public art ever made.

The evolution from tag to masterpiece happened with extraordinary speed. By 1972, writers were competing not just for quantity — how many times your name appeared — but for quality: larger letters, more elaborate styles, wildly illegible "wildstyle" lettering that required other writers to decode, eventually entire subway car sides covered in single compositions called "whole cars." The crews that produced this work — the Fabulous Five, the Dirty Dozen, the Rolling Thunder Writers — developed a visual language of extraordinary complexity: letter forms, color systems, drip techniques, 3D effects, characters.

Lee Quiñones was perhaps the most celebrated whole-car painter of the era — his compositions covering entire New York subway cars with pictorial murals that quoted everything from comic books to political art. Lady Pink — Sandra Fabara, one of the few women in the predominantly male writing culture — was producing work by 1979 that rivaled any of her male counterparts. The formal sophistication of the work was not incidental. It was the point. Writers spent hours in train yards, risked arrest and physical danger, developed technique over years — all for work that the public would see from a moving platform for three seconds, and that the city was actively trying to erase.

The city's response was escalating criminalization: increasingly severe penalties, vandal squads, buff crews whose sole job was to paint over graffiti. By the late 1970s, the transit authority was spending millions annually on anti-graffiti measures. The writers continued. The formal sophistication of the work increased. The city was engaged in a cultural arms race it was losing — spending money to destroy art that was being made for free.

By 1980, the New York downtown art world — galleries in SoHo, dealers on the Lower East Side — had discovered graffiti writing and was trying to translate it into a gallery context. Fab 5 Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), a Brooklyn writer who had bridged the writing world and the downtown art scene, organized exhibitions. Lee Quiñones and Lady Pink showed in galleries. The market for "street art" was briefly hot, then collapsed as quickly as it had formed, leaving most of the writers without the institutional support the art world had briefly implied was available.

Jean-Michel Basquiat — born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother — had been making street art in Lower Manhattan under the tag SAMO since 1977. His transition to gallery painting in the early 1980s was the most successful of any writer from the graffiti generation: by 1983, he was showing with Andy Warhol; by 1985, he was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. His paintings — dense with text, symbols, African imagery, medical diagrams, art-historical references, and explicit anger about race — were selling for tens of thousands of dollars while he was in his early twenties. He was dead of a drug overdose at 27. His paintings now sell for tens of millions.

The gallery boom of the early 1980s ended abruptly when the market decided street art was a fad rather than a movement. Most of the writers who had briefly shown in galleries lost their gallery representation. The institutions moved on. Basquiat — who had the marketing genius of Andy Warhol and a uniquely translatable aesthetic — survived the transition. The others went back to the streets or went on to other things. The art world had visited, extracted what it wanted, and departed.

In 1984, New York City transit authority president David Gunn announced the "Clean Train Movement" — a systematic program to run no painted subway cars in revenue service. Any car that was painted would be removed from service immediately. By 1989, the program had largely succeeded: the New York subway was clean. The culture that had produced some of the most visually complex public art in American history had been administratively erased from its original context. Mayor Ed Koch called it a victory for civilization.

What happened instead was global dispersal. Writers from New York had been spreading the culture to cities across America and Europe since the late 1970s — through magazines like Subway Art (1984) and Spraycan Art (1987), through films like Style Wars (1983) and Wild Style (1983), through the hip-hop culture that carried all four elements simultaneously. By the time New York's subway was clean, graffiti writing had taken root in London, Paris, Berlin, São Paulo, Tokyo, and Melbourne. The city erased the work. It could not erase the culture. The culture had already left the building.

The global spread of graffiti culture followed the global spread of hip-hop: the same cultural package — DJing, MCing, b-boying, graffiti writing — moved as a unit. By the late 1980s, teenagers in Germany, Brazil, and Japan were writing in styles that traced directly to the Bronx. The culture the South Bronx built from abandoned buildings and spray cans became one of the most globally influential visual and musical movements of the 20th century. The South Bronx itself remained the poorest urban county in the United States.

In the 2000s, the art world rediscovered street art — partly through the international phenomenon of Banksy, a British street artist whose anonymity and politically ironic work made him uniquely marketable to an art market that valued both edginess and commodity. The Museum of Modern Art began acquiring works from the graffiti generation. A Basquiat retrospective at the Barbican in London in 2017 drew 213,000 visitors. Untitled (1982) sold for $110.5 million in 2017 — the highest price ever paid for work by an American artist at auction. The same painting had sold for $19,000 in 1984.

The neighborhoods where the culture was born — the South Bronx, East New York, East Harlem — have been subject to sustained gentrification. The aesthetic vocabulary of graffiti writing — the letterforms, the colors, the visual density — is now used in advertising, in luxury branding, in the design of the expensive apartment buildings replacing the tenements where the writers grew up. The market took the aesthetic and left the community. This is not unique to graffiti. It is the standard operating procedure of American cultural extraction, running again in exactly the form it always has.

The writers who built the culture — who risked arrest, who developed the visual language, who produced the work — are rarely the primary beneficiaries of the art market that now values their tradition. The galleries, the auction houses, the collectors, the real estate developers who use the aesthetic to sell luxury apartments: these are who benefits. The chain is unchanged: a marginalized community creates something powerful; the mainstream discovers it is commercially valuable; the mainstream profits; the community is displaced. The writing was always on the wall.