The culture of the graffiti is an artistically movement which its purpose is the free expression of the ideas of our youth now a days. Graffiti s the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property. It is any type of public markings that may appear in the forms of simple written words to elaborate wall paintings. Graffiti has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. In modern times, spray paint, normal paint and markers have become the most commonly used materials. In most countries, defacing property with graffiti without the property owner's consent is considered vandalism, which is punishable by law.
Sometimes graffiti is employed to communicate social and political messages. Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist and anti-consumerist messages around the London Undergound system during the late 1970s and early 1980s. On top of the political aspect of graffiti as a movement, political groups and individuals may also use graffiti as a tool to spread their point of view
Graffiti was used primarily by political activists to make statements and street gangs to mark territory. It wasn't till the late 1960s that writing's current identity started to form. The history of the underground art movement known by many names, most commonly termed graffiti begins in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during the mid to late '60s and is rooted in bombing. The writers who are credited with the first conscious bombing effort are cornbread and cool earl. They wrote their names all over the city gaining attention from the community and local press. It is unclear whether this concept made its way to New York City via deliberate efforts or if was a spontaneous occurrence.
Starting in the 1960s in New York ghettos and subways, graffiti has evolved into a (still mostly illegal) art form of its own, using spray cans of paint, with a modern history, master practitioners, and categories of style.
Graffiti is one of the elements of the culture surrounding rap music. The award-winning documentary film Style Wars gives a great window on hip-hop graffiti in New York City in the early 1980s.
Graffiti writers translate their inherited worlds in fragments, often wherever fresh architectural mediums become accessible, aiming to reach no one and everyone in particular. Taggers and muralists communicate through graffiti, as if to say, “I dare you to understand.” The transition of graffiti from an underground subculture to U.S. popular culture had compromised the founding principles behind graffiti. Evidence of the subculture’s oppression within hegemonic culture appears in the transition, highlighting deviations of thought and subsequent practices while posing a threatening construction of normalcy.
The surfacing of subcultures and art influenced by graffiti reveals the alternative forms of interaction emerging from marginal ethnic and age groups, illustrating an undertow of social cohesiveness against dominant cultural realities.
Sources:
http://www.daveyd.com/historyofgraf.html
http://wrt-intertext.syr.edu/XV/BeautifulLosers.pdf
