Nowhere to Paint, Nowhere to Learn
Submitted by admin on
Nowhere to Paint, Nowhere to Learn (Find Original Article Here)
Posted By: Jason Youmans
07/30/2008 8:00 AM
By cracking down on street art of all sorts, has the city lost a valuable tool in the battle against bad graffiti?
As Monday learned after publishing a recent editorial in defense of graffiti, it seems no one in Victoria likes the lowly tagger. But in a city quick to buff the first sign of unsolicited spray paint from its walls while offering no alternative for budding Banksys* to feed their egos and make their names known, the Garden City is setting itself up for a tourism-dependent town’s worst nightmare—an endless cycle of really crappy graffiti.
Monday recently caught up with a decade-long veteran of the local aerosol art community to talk about the city’s graffiti scene, why there are so many trashy tags and what happens when there’s no place for people to hone their skills without fear of getting cuffed by the cops. For obvious reasons, he wishes to remain anonymous, so we’ll call him Rusto—after a paint popular among that set.