How has graffiti evolved?

Traditionally, graffiti has been considered a sign of urban decline, but as graffiti gains acceptance as a form of artistic self-expression, some public spaces, such as 5Pointz Aerosol Art Center in Long Island City, N.Y. and the Wynwood Walls in Miami, welcome graffiti on their walls.

British artist Banksy is currently presenting a month-long street art "residency" in New York, named "Better Out Than In." His projects, which are announced on his site daily, range from graffiti on trucks and public walls to live performances, and the subject matter is often political and provocative.

Carlos Mare has seen graffiti move from the edges of mainstream culture to prominent placement in museums and galleries. He created graffiti on the streets of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, and then began making metal sculpture in 1985. In the video below, from the Oct. 15 edition of Consider This, Mare tells host Antonio Mora and Christian Viveros-Faune, art critic for The Village Voice, that graffiti can help people find a means for self-expression.

Mare goes on to tell Mora that the work he and other graffiti artists made several decades ago set the foundation for graffiti to be accepted as an art form.

MARE: Graffiti art is both a social reaction, a cultural reaction, but also it’s really become an aspirational art that has blended into mainstream media, institutions, museums, and galleries across the world.

MORA: When you were younger, would you have ever thought any of your work might end up in a museum? They take walls down and sell them for a million dollars.

MARE: No, I mean, but we were building that blueprint very early on in the late '70s and early '80s. And so these guys are really standing on the shoulders of history that has steadily grown to merge the street and the gallery and the commercial space.

Viveros-Faune notes that as graffiti becomes more of a fixture in the U.S. art world, its purpose becomes different from graffiti made in less accepting environments.

MORA: As [graffiti] becomes mainstream, what does it do to the art form?

VIVEROS-FAUNE: Well, you know, one of the things it does, the same way it does for other kinds of artists and other kinds of media, is that it basically leads to a significant amount of power away from the medium, the way it’s used by a specific group. You know, that's undeniable. Look, if graffiti art (just like any kind of art or any kind of artists), is essentially sort of the initial wedge for gentrification, well then it's a different relationship to both legality and to self-expression, then if people are doing it on the underside of a bridge in Detroit or any other city in America. To consider your context, there's a guy named Ganzeer in Egypt who's very, very well known for a very good reason: He essentially manages to make very, very important graffiti in a very scary political context. He's brave to do so. I think the meaning of graffiti changes in Egypt, when it's been made by Ganzeer and when it's being made by somebody in the Wynwood District [of Miami] to basically help somewhere along the sort-of food chain, [as] a set of developers develop an area in Miami.

MARE: It's interesting because graffiti, the culture, has become a very lucrative business, [for] real estate businesses, municipalities, and for artists themselves. There is a complete, self-sustaining system that writers have built for themselves in terms of making the tools for painting, creating art spaces, creating a marketplace for themselves, creating opportunities within the media space as art directors, creative directors, and so on. Out of the context of the street … it matures and it grows. I mean, clearly, being an artist/sculptor, a scholar, and a U.S. cultural ambassador is a great example of that, of potentially what art can do you for you, and [what] you in turn do for others. And so when people ask me, "Well, do you regret doing all that criminal mischief?" I say, "No, that’s part of the passage I had to take to get to where I am, as a whole person."

What is your view of graffiti? Should it be equated with more established forms of art? Share your comments below.