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 webslinky: urban art
This week, Jody gets down to some hard graf. Things we already know about graffiti: it's illegal, it can drastically devalue neighbouring property, it costs governments the world over an absolute fortune to clean up and it looks cool. But not all of it comes out of a can.Moose is a street artist living in Leeds who never touches spray paint. Instead, he scrapes filth from walls and pavements to create a unique "clean graffiti". Leeds council don’t know what to do with him (perhaps he’ll be forced to cover it up with dirt again), as this npr.org story reports. You can see Moose's work on his website, Symbollix. The Wooster Collective is a celebration of the more traditional form of urban art, updated daily. Showcasing work from around the world and profiling the creators, Wooster treats its subject with the respect it deserves. Check out these great examples of where street art overlaps with urban living, such as this street sign and these adapted street markings. Graffiti Archaeology charts graf hotspots in San Francisco to show how works change over time. An artist may hit a wall, then a few months later someone else adds to it, before it all gets white-washed over and the process starts from scratch again. It looks like the council bought a lot of white paint in 2002. If you feel inspired to tag a wall but don't fancy doing time for it, you could try Zewall (perhaps pronounced "ze wall" in a French accent). It’s an online paint package with everything bar the airbrush taken away. There are some impressive submissions in the gallery, but, despite multiple attempts, my efforts were so bad that had I scrawled them in "da hood" then my "homies" would probably have turned "hater" and "capped my ass". So, things we've learnt about graffiti today: it's an art best left to the pros.
Jody Smith
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