London Graffiti

It has been a little while since I've done a streetart or graffiti post, but I have been admiring and featuring both for as long as I have been blogging. Usually I have to stalk other sites to feed my addiction for subversive public art, but since I've been in London I've stumbled across a number of different pieces firsthand. These were snapped rather all over the place in my wanderings.















I read the question recently "Are tattoos art or graffiti?" Which really made me beg the question, "Isn't graffiti art?" I mean, we are probably all familiar with the pointless and usually rather ugly, tagging that goes on (tagging is generally just spray painting your name all over the place), but there's so much more to graffiti than that. There are artists who spray poetry (literally) and those who do really dynamic scenes or figures (like Banksy). While all of these are rather subversive in the fact that they are illegal, I think there is real merit to what they are creating. So, I suppose for me tattoos and graffiti both have their pointless bits (tramp stamps and tagging), but it would be wrong to make generalizations about both spheres entirely based on those aspects.