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What is "graffiti"~~?

Yeah. . . I can't say. . . You can look for it yourself. . .

Sorry, I copied this, but there is a book called "Graffiti" (limited edition), you can find it.

Graffiti: It is what we commonly call graffiti.

Graffiti art, like hip-hop music, originated in the Bronx, New York. The Bronx is the only neighborhood connected to the United States and is also the poorest neighborhood in New York. Since the 1960s, it has been occupied by black and Latino residents from Central and North America. They live in poorly equipped slum apartments built by the government, surrounded by dilapidated streets and desolate weeds.

Years of poverty have made black teenagers worship money extremely. Being a professional athlete is a shortcut for them to get rich quickly. At that time, it was common to see groups of shirtless black boys playing basketball on the few basketball courts in the Bronx. Many of them wore gold chains as thick as their fingers around their necks. The worship of money made public display of wealth a fashion in the Bronx. Of course, there are also many young people who have started illegal businesses such as drug trafficking and pimping.

If you do these illegal things, you are likely to be caught by the police or targeted by street gangsters. Therefore, these people formed gangs to protect themselves. For a time, countless underworld organizations emerged in the Bronx, such as the "Primitive Skeletons", "Savage Ronin", "Javelin Team", "Royal Wizards", "Seven Crowns" and so on. At that time, many young people joined various gangs in search of a sense of belonging. In their naive imagination, gangs are like those depicted in Bruce Lee movies, where a group of people unite to fight with their opponents and build eternal friendships in the process.

During that time, gang symbols scrawled across the Bronx could be seen crookedly scrawled, mixed with obscene patterns that resembled "toilet literature." American newspapers described the Bronx as "like a primitive settlement." No wonder some people associate graffiti with primitive people, because the earliest human writings and paintings were engraved on walls, and those murals are the only records of civilization left by prehistoric humans. But with the advent of paper, murals became a symbol of uncivilization. Especially after the emergence of cities, modern people seem to have become accustomed to the smooth surfaces of buildings, and any pattern has become a kind of destruction, a kind of anti-civilization spiritual pollution.

If the murals in the Bronx remain in the age of gang tags, future generations may have nothing to say. However, a few people with drawing talents began to design new labels themselves out of dissatisfaction with the crude gang labels. Since then, these gang symbols have become better-looking. Later, a group of non-gangster painters with a rebellious spirit finally realized that the wall was the cheapest and most practical canvas in the world, and they took action. Since then, a new art form - "Graffiti" (Graffiti) was born.

Most of the real graffiti artists have nothing to do with gangs. They are poor people from the bottom, and their spray cans and paints are stolen from stores. They were all thoughtful people, and from then on, cautionary mottoes appeared on the walls of New York. They are all talented people, and many fresh brushwork techniques in painting (especially artistic fonts) emerged from this. More importantly, they are a group of people with a strong desire to express themselves. They are not paid and are willing to haunt the dark nights of New York all year round just to let passers-by take a look at their works. To distance themselves from gang taggers and simple-minded graffiti writers, they call themselves writers instead of painters.

In order to avoid being caught by the police and to add a mysterious color to their works, these "writers" all designed a signature for themselves. Most of their signatures are a simple word with a number suffixed. The first "writer" mentioned in a newspaper was named "Taki 183", and the article appeared in the New York Times in 1971. The protagonist's real name is Demitrius, Taki is the Greek abbreviation of Demitrius, and 183 is the name of the street where he lives. That report was the first serious discussion of graffiti culture.

Soon, the graffiti writers were not satisfied with static walls, and they came up with the idea of ????subway cars. New York has the most developed subway system in the world, with tracks running like streets throughout New York City. At that time, New York residents working the morning shift were often surprised to find that a subway car that had been fine last night suddenly turned into a mobile graffiti exhibition, covered with colorful patterns. Those letters are like bubbles, full of movement. The most amazing thing is that after changing cars, the pattern is still the same! So, they remembered a signature: Phase 2.

This Phase 2 is the most famous graffiti painter in the early 1970s. His original name was Lonny Wood and he graduated from Clinton High School in the Bronx. This middle school was once a meeting place for early graffiti artists. Not far from here is the New York Department of Transportation parking lot, where scrapped subway cars are stored. So that parking lot became a place for them to practice. Wood is a black man and extremely talented.

The "bubble letters" he created are the best representative of the Bronx graffiti style, and he is known as the Miles Davis (Miles Davis, the famous jazz trumpeter) of the graffiti world.

Following Phase 2, graffiti in New York has undergone many style changes, with the emergence of three-dimensional letters, train animation (a series of character animations, the characters become active after the subway train starts moving) and a series of new Creativity. A group of talented graffiti painters have become stars, such as SUPER KOOL 223, El Marko174, Staff 161, Cliff 159, Flint 707 and so on. The then Mayor of New York, Lindsay, turned a blind eye to this because there were many more important things waiting for him to deal with in the chaotic New York City than graffiti. The laissez-faire attitude of the city government is an important reason why graffiti, and even hip-hop culture as a whole, can develop and grow.

New York's so-called "high-class" artists have repeatedly tried to claim graffiti as their own. Several art dealers held a large-scale graffiti exhibition in Manhattan's SoHo district in 1973, which attracted a lot of media attention. They asked graffiti artists to paint their works on canvas and put them up for sale in exhibition halls. Predictably, the exhibition was scorned by critics. Those art dealers ignored the fact that only the works painted on the walls of apartments or outside subway cars were real graffiti.

Later, a man named Freddie organized a group of graffiti painters and went to punk rock clubs in downtown New York to promote them, achieving certain success. One of his graffiti painters named Samo has gained great popularity with his outstanding skills and personal charm. The real name of this Brooklyn-born painter is Jean-Michel Basquiat. This person has achieved impressive success whether in the field of graffiti, painting on canvas, or later three-dimensional sculptures. score. More importantly, he himself has always lived a bohemian life and is a living graffiti work. A documentary film based on him, "New York Beat Movie", truly recorded his daily life and left precious information for future generations. Unfortunately, Basquiat died of a drug overdose in 1988. Later generations often compare him with the veteran of rock and roll, Jimi Hendrix.

After this brief revival, graffiti disappeared in the United States. The government's increasingly strict management has frightened graffiti artists, and advertisers' imitation of graffiti techniques has completely lost motivation for graffiti artists. But in other lax cities around the world, graffiti is still taking off. The live broadcast in 1989 allowed many people to appreciate the graffiti masterpiece on the Berlin Wall for the first time. Whether it is Madrid in Europe or Buenos Aires in South America, the works of graffiti artists can still be seen on the streets and subway stations to this day.