Graffiti Hatred - Why? When? How?

The passing houses of once such pride and glory, now left alone to deprave the society in every possible way. The peace and the quiet of the evening leaves a great space for thoughts to fly around, leaving me digging up the causes of the first thing I can see. As a matter of fact, the only thing I was looking at, while waiting for the lights to finally turn green, was an ASM ‘throwie’ (Or maybe it was meant to be a tag... Whatever) smeared on the wall in quite a rush. Something clicked inside of me and I understood that this night will be spent writing a blog post of whys and whens of the ‘Say No To Graffiti’ thing that has expanded humongously in quite of a never-ending stage.

 I don’t know much about other countries’ attitude on graffiti painting, but Latvian people sure do hate graffiti as a dreadful, evil way to spend your time. Graffiti writers, in the minds of most of the society, are assholes and would definitely end up with a few digits lost, if ever caught on scene by the many angry grannies there are. This kind of attitude has been with us for quite some time and has never changed. The stars of the Latvian graffiti scene are never seen by the eyes of the urban spectator, as everything he sees are the 99 out of 100 ‘tags’. The one piece he would like is simply drowned by the horrendous pieces of everything else. So Why, When and How is the question I’d like to ask myself and, hopefully, the answer is not too far to be found.

 In my opinion, graffiti is a valuable art and should not be muffled by the hands of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ understanding of some jerks up there. It’s an urban standard and has everything to do with the growth, intelligence and the reflections of the urban society, so it simply can’t be banned. Of course, this still leaves space for a great deal of the sub-zero attitude of the society itself, who never knows about the goods the graffiti is subconsciously providing it (A stencil idea has already been made about this one, stay tuned). The simple why of the huge problem is quite simple – there simply are no real professionals here in Latvia. Okay, throwie artist, such as Saki, Kiwie, Faro, Sene, are quite good, but Latvia has never foreseen real wildstyles, really good wheatpastes or even professionally done stencils. We’re literally the retards of the Urban art cult. Okay, this could change, when the hype movement of ‘Graff’s cool’ reaches Latvia, but that would still leave the main problem the same, even if some people would like graffiti only because it makes them look cool. So, yes – the problem that lies within the hardly changeable problem is the lack of any professionals here.

 Some may think that there is nothing to be changed, rather than simply bringing some great guys to paint here, which seems far too hard and expensive to do. Well, that would change the problem, but there are much more many things to be done, in order to change the attitude of the people out there. First, there should be opened a lot of new graffiti schools ‘round the town. People should get to know how to make real art from some high class professionals (Maybe from Europe – I believe a lot of people would be interested to do such a job), that way reducing the bad graffiti in the streets by a great deal. Secondly, some walls of the citys’ property should be given away for public street art use. Seems funny, but if a lot of walls would be made available, then nobody would paint on them. The wall would be bombed heavily for a week or two (See the Banksys’ genius work of ‘legal graff’), but, after a few licks of paint, would be left untouched by the ‘violent fiends’ of the urban world.

 The problem once again seems really huge, but, when broken in small pieces, reveals a very, very simple point and an even easier solution to it. Case cracked some may say, but the truth is much different – the hypothetical observation of the fact has never ever changed anything.

[Bli:p]