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Some consider graffiti to be art
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IT is disappointing to hear the ill-considered comments of our Camden Environment executive Cllr Mike Green when he attacked a local garage owner for allowing a street artists’ collective to paint the wall above his garage (Graffiti artists sign up for vandals blitz, Oct 19).
He describes the garage owner as “shooting his neighbours in the foot” because he says any “graffiti encourages graffiti”. I would have expected a rather more informed approach from someone who is leading a council “blitz on graffiti”.
I am sure that most people dislike the kind of casual ‘tagging’ that proliferates in cities but there is no evidence that graffiti artists such as Banksy and London Front Line do encourages tagging or other forms of graffiti into an area.
It is true that in certain circumstances graffiti writing on particular walls, estates, ‘legal’ graffiti sites or areas does appear to draw graffiti writers into the area to ‘tag’ or do bigger pieces, but this is not the work that London Frontline appear to be doing.
It may not be to Cllr Greene’s taste, but a lot of people like the kind of work that artists such as London Front Line, Bansky and others do on our streets. When Banksy ‘illegally’ painted a stencil on the wall of the Roundhouse in the summer local people were so positive about it that the Roundhouse decided to keep it.
I am not alone in preferring to see the kind of art that is going up on local shutters and walls, than the dreary, confusing proliferation of street signs as you come down through Kentish Town.
There are other forms of vandalism than graffiti.
VICKI EVES
Torrington Place, WC1
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