graffiti, a meritocracy

Design an image, crafting it lovingly from the aether. Make it appealing to look at, and fill it will subtle meaning. Then, after much gentle and loving effort, venture out into the night and glue it to a pole, abandoning it there. This is the life of the street artist. Once his picture is up and his work is done, he vanishes into the darkness to wait and see how the Universe will respond. As a seasoned veteran of the streets, he operates cunningly and without ado; occasionally, however, he struggles with memories of earlier agony. Oh how he would sweat when first starting out, and quiver, his knees shaking on the way to check and see if his image were still up or if it had been scraped down or covered over in the few hours since it was born. Oh how he would wallow in sadness at finding his tender little piece plastered over with another person's art, or, worse, hacked off and discarded by a member of one of those Artwork Desecration Teams. The budding street artist suffers trepidation because his graffiti – once it is stuck up or otherwise applied – stops belonging to just one person and becomes the common property of anyone who might look at it; it merges with the harsh and tumultuous meritocracy that is graffiti.

If the graffiti artist wants to keep his sanity, he will realize quickly (by delving deeply into his soul-space and maintaining a proper equilibrium there) that his street art, along with the graffiti applied by the next vandal, is just one segment in a giant, shifting mosaic applied by hundreds of selfless SDUBS (Self Directed Urban Beautification Specialists) whose goal is to enliven the otherwise colorless and visually barren asphalt landscape (phaltscape). With enough experience he will understand that by covering only a portion of his piece instead of defacing it entirely, the other street artists deem his art edgy, unique, or beautiful enough to merit a continuing existence on wall, pole, and street-sign. (Exceptions to this rule include if his work is so terribly lame as to be worth neither time nor effort to cover over or if he is particularly good at putting his pieces in places few others might reach, which in itself would prove his mettle.) As long as he stays in the graffiti game, he shall, in time, develop a vandal's eye of his own, which will allow him to judge which pieces to cover over, which to incorporate into his newest work of art, and which to not touch at all.

His is a dangerous game of applying and fleeing, watching and forgetting, shrugging and re-applying. His is a world in which his city destroys his art nearly as quickly as he can apply it, a world in which his work must stand not only the test of time but also appeal to the sensibilities of any subsequent vandal whose primarily purpose is to destroy the phaltscape. He must keep one eye out for meddlesome and ever-watchful cops while contending with some of the finest artists operating today for display space, artists who plaster over poor and inferior works of art mercilessly and without hesitation. Such is life in the harsh meritocracy of the graffiti-writer.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥