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.

Graffiti vandals turn violent in LA
Aug 1 02:35 PM US/Eastern By THOMAS WATKINS Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) - One man got stabbed. Another got shot in the chest. A 6-year-old boy was temporarily blinded when he was spray-painted in the face.

And they were the lucky ones among those who have had run-ins with graffiti "crews," or gangs.

Over the past 2 1/2 years in Southern California, three people have been killed after trying to stop graffiti vandals in the act. A fourth died after being shot while watching a confrontation between crews in a park.

By CHUCK BENNET
NY Post (Link to Original Article)

No hefty price tag for ignoring S.F. graffiti

Original SF Chronicle Article

Marisa Lagos, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

San Francisco officials have made graffiti cleanup a crusade over the past few years, pushing for the prosecution of vandals and fighting to hold private citizens accountable for tagging on their properties.

But a lack of money to pay city lawyers to go after the property owners has hobbled a much-touted anti-graffiti law, several members of the city's graffiti advisory board say.

T.A.G. (Totally Against Graffiti) got a good laugh during the Roxie's viewing of the graffiti doc "Bomb It" tonight. This org is well funded and serious about ending the war against graffiti in LA. This org even sponsored the competition "The Difference Between ARt and Graffiti, where the winning child got its art put on a logo-ridden NASCAR race car. Tax dollars hard at work, city leaders seem to forget that ownership of city streets is difficult to express in a simple puppet show.

From the Stencil Archive inbox:

Jonathan Curiel, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, August 3, 2007
Original article with photos

Warm Water Cove is a park on the southern waterfront of San Francisco that doesn't get much traffic from tourists, or even San Franciscans. It does have a devoted group of regulars, however - dog walkers, musicians who enjoy the acoustics, and graffiti artists who have transformed walls into a cacophony of scribblings and images.

The New York Times
June 30, 2007
Art

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Until the pranks turned ugly, it was heartening to follow the dust-up between a bunch of street artists and their nemesis or nemeses, identity unknown. As The New York Times reported this week, for some time works of stenciled graffiti art and wheat-pasted posters slapped onto walls in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan have been splashed with paint and scrawled with messages of protest.

San Francisco Chronicle Staff Report

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

A Santa Rosa graffiti vandal was sentenced Monday to 1,000 hours of
community service and three years of felony probation after he pleaded
no contest earlier this year to two counts of felony vandalism,
prosecutors said.