[Lia]

Hello all. I'm a grad student (getting a masters in arts journalism) and I'm writing my dissertation on the gentrification of graffiti. The idea here is for me to write a magazine-style article with a specific zine in mind to try to sell the article to once it's all over. At this point I'm shooting for the style of Vice Magazine (check it out: Vice Magazine US ).

I've always been under the impression that graffiti is about taking back public spaces from the corporations that plaster everything with billboards and advertisements. But lately it seems like graffiti has become totally commodified. Fafi is making expensive sneakers and clothes with Adidas, Banksy gets paid thousands of dollars for his works on canvas, the Brooklyn Museum had an exhibit a few months back on early graffiti, you see graff images on merchandise and advertisments of all kinds, and book after book after book is getting published.

I'm still on the fence about whether all of this mainstream presence is good or bad. I mean, everybody's gotta make a living somehow and it's better to make money off your art than to be a corporate schmuck, right? But isn't all this commercialization pretty much the antithesis of everything graffiti is supposed to stand for?

I'm looking for artists from both sides of the issue to interview. Ideally I'd like to meet in person to conduct interviews with a tape recorder (can't have any fact errors!). I'm located in NYC, but I'm willing to make trips elsewhere (to a certain degree, anyways). And who knows? Maybe the article will get picked up and you'll get published!

Please e-mail me at leahmhansen@yahoo.com or you can post here with your own e-mail address. I'd like to talk through e-mail for a bit before discussing any actual meetings. (If you e-mail me, please put "graffiti interview" or some such phrase in the subject line so I know it's not spam.)

Thank you to anyone who helps me out!

[Gone84]

the selling of this artform is hardly new. Its just been revitalized. Living in NYC you should have access to a number of resources if you can find where to dig because there are a number of old heads still out there doing their thing. Ours is a public art and is meant to grab the eye of everyone that can see it for miles. It is advertising without financial compensation lol. Its not hard to see how or why this would be made available to the mainstream in a more compact package. How much history have you looked into regarding this movement? It is very well documented for a folk art.

[Lia]

Yeah, I've been reading up quite a bit on its history. I'm not going into this totally blind. But I figured posting on some forums would be a good way to find a large number of interview subjects. I've also been trying to get in touch with some authors of recent books, and some of my friends who are friends with artists are putting me in touch with them. Since this is a magazine story, the material I use is supposed to be largely interview-based, so books and documentation can only take me so far. Hence, the post here. I have to put as many lines in the water as I can to catch a few fish, so to speak.

[Gone84]

makes sense. not to mention that people were smart enough to make a mythology of the whole thing when being interviewed way back. The attitude was alot different back then than it is now. But then it was a lot of poor people seizing the opportunity not to be poor, now the whole thing means different things than it did then. I wouldnt go so far as to say the whole scene is subject to gentrification like when rich people start building lofts in the ghetto, but graffiti has managed to pull in people from many different social settings and is no longer dominated by the underpriviledged. Thats my opinion on it anyway.