I see graffiti everyday day, multiple times a day on the streets of New York. But there is a reason why this one needs to be discussed. First of all, I saw this and wanted to keep walking past it. However, I couldn’t, and eventually I came back to take a picture of it. The word written here on the garage is, from my understanding, ‘brethren.’ Gangs use graffiti to write messages demeaning one another. Most of the time, the language is coded and hard to decipher, and then when people come to interpret it in English, the meaning is usually a negative one. That’s not exactly the case with this word. The person writing the word here had something positive to say, about gangs in general. I felt like the message he/she tried to put out there was ” Hey! Let’s all just stop the violence, and think about what it is that we’re doing out here. Because in the end, we’re all brothers, or ‘brethren’. That’s what counts.” Not only is the message in the word important, but also the style and handwriting of the person who spray-painted this garage. Isn’t that an art? You see, I always look at graffiti, and sit there trying to decipher the codes, but this time I think I’ve really done it. By the way, I should’ve wrote this earlier, but whatever: I saw this right outside of our school, somewhere between Park and Madison Avenues. All in all, I love the way this thing was written, and the possibility of it addressing the same meaning and definition I came up with thrills me as well.
The Arts in NYC
Baruch College, Fall 2013
I feel like a lot of people turn things into a competition too often. The birth of graffiti was to enable a more accessible way to express oneself through art. It wasn’t about turf wars or who was more “badass”. Supporting this behavior demeans the whole art form as a whole. It’s great to see that people still keep graffiti’s mission at heart: to express and unify the masses.
Definitely: if graffiti as a movement is supposed to be a group or a coalition, then it’s not about competition and turf wars. All of that can come after graffiti is accepted worldwide, but not beforehand. And I also found it interesting that the word “brethren” had nothing fancy about it, it was a plain and bold statement, and nobody would get distracted by fancy colors along with it or fancy pictures that someone tagged. It’s just a powerful word which indicates what people are forgetting.
Not much of a graffiti fan myself, I can’t help but comment on this post. My neighborhood gang would often tag the playground I grew up playing in. Though I was unable to decode the graffiti myself, I had older friends who could. When I asked them what it meant, I was usually given the response that it wasn’t appropriate for me to know. I was so accustomed to seeing graffiti as a form of declaring territory and or a means of demoralizing others, that I never really considered it to be art. This piece makes me appreciate graffiti more as an art form that can bring people together more than break them apart.