Graffiti is Art!

As a little kid, I used to think I was cool. In fact, I thought I was so cool, that I felt it was necessary at times to run around with my "equally-as-cool" friends and do what I thought was graffiti. It took a while for me to realize that the idiotic little lines of matallic blue that I painted along ghetto sidewalks was nothing compared to real graffiti.

I first got a taste of true graffiti when I was living in Pennsylvania. There was this wall that I found when I got lost driving to New Jersey that was completely covered in strange multicolored characters and words and it was the most beautiful piece of art I had ever seen. Years later, I would be walking along a street in Atlanta with my mother in law, thoroughly embarassed that she just doesn't see the art in a wall covered in the paint the way I do. People keep talking about traditions that have become "lost art", and I wonder why people never think about the "art that never was". I think that graffiti, true graffiti, with characters and messages not the stupid juvenile things I used to create, really is art, regardless of where it's put.