‘I have a message for the graffiti vandals out there,’ he said recently. Peter Vallone, a New York city councillor, thinks that graffiti done with permission can be art, but if it is on someone else’s property it becomes a crime. The debate over whether graffiti is art or vandalism is still going on. By the 1980s it became much harder to write on subway trains without being caught, and instead many of the more established graffiti artists began using roofs of buildings or canvases. But at the same time that it began to be regarded as an art form, John Lindsay, the then mayor of New York, declared the first war on graffiti.

Art galleries in New York began buying graffiti in the early seventies. They worked in groups called ‘crews’, and called what they did ‘writing’ – the term ‘graffiti’ was first used by The New York Times and the novelist Norman Mailer. In the early days, the ‘taggers’ were part of street gangs who were concerned with marking their territory. In the mid seventies it was sometimes hard to see out of a subway car window, because the trains were completely covered in spray paintings known as ‘masterpieces’. The new art form really took off in the 1970s, when people began writing their names, or ‘tags’, on buildings all over the city.

Modern graffiti seems to have appeared in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, and by the late sixties it had reached New York. Later the Ancient Romans and Greeks wrote their names and protest poems on buildings. The first drawings on walls appeared in caves thousands of years ago.

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