Margaret Kilgallen on Graffiti
April 6th, 2009
“I have explained graffiti and compared it to the barrage of images we see every day, especially advertising, and how on billboards or corner stores or anywhere, advertising is absolutely everywhere — and yet it doesn’t bother anybody. We completely block it out as if we don’t see it, but for some reason we don’t think of it as garbage. Instead, maybe we look at graffiti, or the public looks at graffiti, and sees garbage and ugliness, and I always wonder why they don’t look at the billboards [that way]… Why isn’t that garbage? That’s like mind garbage. It’s like commercials on TV, and yet nobody ever questions that, it’s so much a part of their view of the world every single day. And when I explained that to my parents, they began to understand why other people might want to put their own visuals — graffiti — in their own neighborhood, something that they could relate to.”
