Comparing what a street artist does to what a tagger does is like comparing what Caravaggio did with a canvas to what a dog does to a fire hydrant. The Renaissance master brought beauty into the world. The dog does little more than mark his territory.
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“And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.”—Genesis 4:8 (King James Version)
Of all the fantastic festivals that grace the Montreal summer, the Mural Festival is by far my favorite. Among other things, it makes manifest how far the Montreal street art scene has come in the last few years. It’s heartwarming to see artists who could barely make rent a decade ago selling some paintings, making some money, and “kicking some ass for a change” (as Montreal street artist Chris Dyer put it). It’s nice, as well, to see that street art is finally getting respect from art critics and gallery owners. But, strange as it may sound, there are people in this city who aren’t happy to see street art doing so well. Believe it or not, there are those who despise street artists precisely because what they do is accessible, successful, and beautiful. These people are commonly known as taggers.
Like Cain and Abel, tagging and street art came from the same place and were once as close as brothers can be. But they’ve diverged to such an extent in the last two decades that their differences now far outweigh their similarities. Indeed, the older street artists I know who stridently insist upon the similarities between street art and tagging do so, it seems to me, largely for nostalgic reasons, much as friends who’ve grown apart talk incessantly—whenever they get together—about the good old days, as a way of avoiding the fact that they no longer have anything in common.
What follows are seven snarky reasons why I believe that street art and tagging should no longer be considered members of the same artsy-fartsy family:
ONE: Comparing street artists and taggers is like comparing the chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant to the zitty teenager who flips burgers absentmindedly at McDonald’s. TWO: Comparing what a street artist does to what a tagger does is like comparing what Caravaggio did with a canvas to what a dog does to the fire hydrant in front of my house. The Renaissance master brought beauty into the world. The dog does little more than mark his territory. THREE: Comparing street artists and taggers is like comparing buskers and beggars. FOUR: Public artists reclaim public space in the name of beauty. And they seek to communicate with a wide audience. By contrast, taggers have a palpable contempt for the masses. Sure, they like to think of themselves as counter-cultural rebels. But their contempt for the citizenry—and for public discourse—makes them precisely the kind of exclusionary modern elites that John Ralston Saul lambastes in Voltaire’s Bastards (1992). Like most engineers, computer geeks, academics, and modern artists, taggers speak in a language that is unnecessarily abstruse, an anti-democratic language whose sole purpose is to exclude the uninitiated. When I speak in a language that only the cool kids can understand, when I speak in an academic dialect whose sole purpose is to exclude people who don’t have an MA or a PhD in whatever, I’m behaving like a tagger. FIVE: That hummingbird in Peru—you know, the giant geoglyph in the Nazca Desert—was created in the spirit of street art; what Greenpeace did to it was done in the spirit of the tagger. The same reckless disregard for the sacred spaces of others—which is a hallmark of the tagger worldview—was in evidence when those clueless activists walked all over a UNESCO World Heritage Site. SIX: Tagging culture is an excellent manifestation of a rather nasty elitist tendency that’s written right into the DNA of cultural modernism. The fact that taggers don’t have money or power is irrelevant—just as irrelevant, in fact, as the fact that tagging is illegal. After all, a neo-Nazi subculture could easily be described as “edgy” and “counter-cultural”—but that surely wouldn’t make it, by default, progressive. Regardless, most of the taggers I’ve met don’t see themselves as “of the people”, much less “for the people”. All to the contrary, like fanatics and fundamentalists, taggers believe themselves to be far superior to “the people”. Truth be told, their visceral contempt for “the people” makes the stuff that snooty socialites say about the common folk seem positively democratic by comparison.
I was shocked to learn, just this past year, that an awesome guy I met through a mutual friend lives a double life: by night, he’s a notorious tagger who operates in my neighborhood. And he’s destroyed many beautiful murals over the years. Hearing about this was, for me, half as bad as finding out that the cool guy you partied with last weekend is into child pornography. I remain thoroughly scandalized. After all, this guy’s not some ten-year-old kid trying to make a name for himself. Nor is he a confused teenager. This guy’s in his mid-30s! Shouldn’t he know better? That’s more or less what I asked him the last time I ran into him on the street. His blame-the-victim response was as creepy as it was disappointing. It was a version of the same sociopathic sophistry I’ve heard many times over the years from sleazy salesmen, professional pickpockets, career criminals, and treacherous telemarketers: about suckers who deserve to get screwed over because they’re stupid, yuppies who deserve to have their property defaced because they’re assholes, and street artists who deserve to have their work ruined because they’re pretentious.
SEVEN: What’s funny about this whole discussion concerning the relationship between street art and tagging is that it’s so often wrapped up in a piety, and a hypocrisy, that’s just as strange as anything I’ve seen in the Bible Belt. Almost everyone involved in the street art scene says one thing in public and an entirely different thing in private: publicly, they chastise me for saying anything bad about taggers, and recite the usual Articles of Faith (in a suspiciously similar fashion) about the relationship between street art and tagging—but privately they tell me they agree with me 100%. I feel like I’m the only atheistic politician in Washington DC willing to admit publicly that I don’t believe in God. All the other members of Congress denounce me as a monster in front of the cameras, in the most strident manner—only to later on that very day confess to me that they’re atheists too.
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2015)
p.s. A friend of mine quite rightly observed, just now, in a private message, that I really ought to address the way in which Montreal’s Mural Festival is funded: “From speaking to one of the artists when I went, I was told, to my surprise, that they are mostly corporate funded. The colors, for example, are chosen based on the company’s brand.” This is a very valid concern. Corporate corruption of the art world is an ever-present possibility: something to keep an eye on. But corporate sponsorship isn’t nearly as problematic as many seem to think it is. I suspect that we see corporate sponsorship as deeply and necessarily problematic because we’re still living in the shadow of the “art for art’s sake” movement, and many of the artists we know are living off of government grants. Regardless of the reason, it remains a thoroughly unrealistic standard. Rarely in history were artists independently wealthy; they’ve always had to pay the bills one way or another. During the Italian Renaissance, that meant painting religious themes for the Church or hagiographic shit for a Machiavellian prince; today it might mean painting a mural which employs the colors found on some corporate logo. Is this really such a big deal? I think not. We’re part of the world, friends. There’s no getting around that. We’re all inextricably enmeshed in a thick web of relationships that enrich and delimit our action in the world. Now, as always, power and privilege afford a small minority of artists the freedom to do as they please. Some of these fortunate few produce timeless work, sublime work, but most of them produce forgettable garbage. Art, like philosophy, is usually at its best and most vital when it’s in conversation with the messy world most of us live in.
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Originally published at Committing Sociology. Reprinted with permission. Photo courtesy of author.
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