I’m continuously amazed how murals and stories about murals either point to a project or source of inspiration or the complete opposite — “tagging” and graffiti writing landing perpetrators behind bars. I even read one story that confused the two — it made the “muralist” sound like an artist but police charged him as a “serial tagger” caught while painting “mural” (ref.: Cops: Serial Tagger Nabbed Painting Mural and Man Arrested For Painting On Bridge Wall). That muddies the semantic waters regarding the true meaning of what murals are even further — are they art or illegal graffiti? Even beautiful artistic murals I suppose are considered illegal if the artist has no regard for what is a legal and appropriate canvas, right? (more…)

I’ve increasingly noticed a trend of creating murals where ugly, defacing graffiti used to be. Here in San Diego where I live this trend has been growing for some time, and it seems to be growing elsewhere as this story from Canada states – see “Police turn to artists to stop writing on the wall.”

Graffiti is the “sleazy side of murals” and I’ve always wondered why anyone would do it. I was on a recent trip by train from Atlantic City to Philadelphia, PA and noticed all the graffiti covering railway underpasses. Who does this? And with barely any of it understandable, what are they trying to convey? My only understanding up to this point is that it is to “mark territory” for gangs and the like, but it seems so creepy.

As I struggle to understand how the mind of someone that does this type of thing works, I also find it curious that the one thing that has been found to curb and even stop repeated graffiti tagging is to replace it with actual mural art — and that this works consistently and with most taggers. Is this a statement that even the criminal mind as a social group has a collective boundary to not destroy art?