The G-Word: Virtuosity and Violation, Negotiating and Transforming Graffiti

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Why does the CIA praise graffiti as a colorfulsymbol of the optimism and hope of the WesternWorld while officials in many cities describes thesame phenomenon as a criminal activity and a representationof unsafety and social Problems?Graffiti is a word used to denote a complex systemof actions and things, which is often described as asingular phenomenon. Graffiti has been understoodand evaluated in many ways, often opposing eachother. Graffiti may therefor both be evoked as oneof the most influential art movements on the planet, and dismissed as something that destroys privateproperty and turns a neighborhood into slum. It ishailed as a modern day childhood adventure anddenounced as gang related criminality.In his Ph.D. thesis The G-Word, art historian andformer graffiti writer Jacob Kimvall studies differentways of describing and framing graffiti in fourhistorical and cultural contexts: The graffiti writingon the Berlin wall, the Zero Tolerance on graffitiin Stockholm during the 1990s, The interactionsbetween subcultural graffiti and the cultural andcommercial interest of the institutional art world inthe 1970s and 80s, The collecting, organizing andpublishing of images by graffiti enthusiasts.The G-Word visualize how different institutions, public and commercial interests have acted to influenceand affect the understanding of graffiti as bothart, crime and a broad socio-cultural phenomenon.