‘Art or Vandalism’: A Study of the Role of Graffiti in Society since the 1970s

Ellie Taylor

Graffiti is a controversial subject. Its visual intervention in public space is freely accessible, allowing anyone to voice opinions. It has been called everything from urban blight to creative expression to a commercial product. The most common phraseology used when discussing graffiti is to inquire whether it is ‘art or vandalism’. The dissertation is not aiming to answer this subjective and unwinnable debate but rather unpack it and look at the broader position of graffiti in two cities.

The first chapter of the dissertation takes a historical approach, primarily analysing the 1970s and 80s New York City graffiti culture and early practitioners, such as Dondi, shown painting in the image. This chapter helps the reader understand the movement’s principles and where mainstream attitudes towards graffiti originated. The rest of the dissertation focuses on contemporary Brighton, a city with little scholarly research on its graffiti scene. I investigated the places graffiti occupies, legal and illegal, to discover the positive changing cultural attitudes and negative normative constructions towards graffiti. Throughout the dissertation, participant-based research is interwoven - an interview with a Brighton-based graffiti artist and questionnaires with a Brighton councillor and renowned urban scholar - to show graffiti’s complex perspectives and ambiguity.

This dissertation calls for a more contextualised and nuanced understanding of graffiti; it highlights how the binary opposition, ‘art or vandalism’, restricts people’s perception of graffiti. It is about time people considered the wider role of graffiti in society’s visual culture and how it brings lively debate to neglected city surfaces.