Madam, - Few things in the world annoy me more than a certain brand of latte liberal gushing about the artistic wonders of graffiti.
Last Saturday's Irish TimesMagazine devoted four pages to the topic. "I put stuff up to connect and interact with the city," says one of the vandals. Read that again. Does that statement mean anything? Who is he interacting with? How is he connecting with them? If I sneak across the road in the dead of night and spray-paint my neighbour's house, am I connecting with him? Interacting with him? Or with the town?
Meaningless statements aside, there is something darker at work here. Graffiti is very damaging to society. It is a symbol of urban decay, of the forces of order slowly losing the battle with chaos. New York's graffiti explosion during the late 1970s and early 1980s coincided with the one of the biggest crime eruptions in human history. Artistes and anarchists were behind some of it, but most graffiti were the work of street gangs marking territory or declaring no-go areas. The general population became depressed and demoralised.
But like their Irish equivalents, the New York chatterati cried out with praise for this new "art form", with a number of laudatory articles appearing in the New York Times. Great art, great spirit, counter-culture, gritty, rebellious, yadeeyadeeyada. . . The effects were felt mainly by ordinary and poorer people who had to walk past these monstrous images, which dragged down property values and whole neighbourhoods with them, while the elite was comfortably insulated and could watch the rot from a distance.
A graffiti vandal doesn't believe in property rights, except when it comes to selling his wares. Essentially a parasite, he lives off the collective accomplishments of others - the resources, expertise and work required to erect and maintain a building or train station. A product of extreme individualism, where the only thing that matters is the individual and his right to free expression and action, he stands athwart society.
The masses mean nothing to him. Ordinary working people mean nothing to him. The people who have to shuffle by his garbage every day mean nothing to him. The businesses and councils that have to clean up his mess in the morning mean him to them. The only thing that matters is himself, his ego, the grand artiste above it all. - Yours, etc,
ADRIAN BOLAND, Newbridge, Co Kildare.