Graffiti - the nice kind

An anonymous commenter directed me to the Acadia St. entrance to the new walking trail in Duke Park. There's some new graffiti there "worth a picture."

So i stopped by. And what i saw there, which i'll share with you below, got me thinking a bit. Regular readers should have surmised by now that i'm not opposed to spontaneous public art. The blank canvas that is the Duke Park traffic circle is a constant source of levity, which i try to occasionally bring to a wider audience. Living around New York City back in the 70s, when train art was at its peak, gave me an appreciation for the common need to bring chromatic beauty to the gray and mundane objects of our daily lives, which even the meanest poverty can't weigh down for ever.

Somewhere in the Big Box of Photos That I Will Never Get Around To Sorting is a shot of a mural of giraffes painted on an urban highway overpass. I can't recall now if it was from the BQE in Brooklyn, or I-540 in Oakland.

But, and this seems as well a common function of our humanity, after a time what was originally fresh, new, and joyful becomes burdensome, dreary, and oppressive. The subway car wide murals become unreadable magic marker tags covering everything, less attractive than naked, flat gray steel. The giraffes become signposts, territorial markers warning rivals away.

The problem, or one of the problems anyway, is that there's no objective boundary to clearly define the spontaneous, joy bringing art from the nasty stuff. Your tastes and mine differ; our defining lines fall in different places along the spectrum.

So, here's what i saw on Acadia St. last night.



And i'm OK with it, for a couple of reasons. It's cute and whimsical. The flower growing up from the weeds along the wall. The happy message. The fish. (Well, maybe not the fish. What are they doing there, anyway?) The best part, though, and what makes it acceptable to me?

It's done in sidewalk chalk. One good rain, and it's gone. It doesn't seek to claim ownership of what is, after all, communal property. It doesn't say "This is mine, not yours."

And that's where i draw my lines.

UPDATE: When i first started drafting this post, i had been thinking about something i'd seen on Joe's blog, and meant to link to that. But i spaced by the time i finished. But if you want to see an example of spontaneous public art that doesn't seek to claim territory, proclaim ennui, or exclaim wrath, check it out.