h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Here in New York, we have many different styles of graffiti visible on your average subway ride.

There's the colorful spray can graffiti on building tops and walls. These usually use the artist's initials as a starting point, but are often so elaborate that you must look carefully to read the letters.

Then there are the enormous white block letters sprawled across the black walls along the underground subway lines. These are often of quick messages, meant to be read at 15 to 30 miles per hour. All too often, you'll only see these when the train's service is slowed.

There are also the signatures and short messages added inside stations with spray paint or scratched into various surfaces inside the cars. These serve a function not unlike the old bathroom stalls of old. The verbose ones might tell you a joke, insult some unknown person rudely, plea to the public at large for hope or happiness, or offer a pithy tip for living well. But most simply gave a name and perhaps a date.

And finally there's the protest graffiti found most commonly on the poster ads outside the trains. The beautiful people are given horns and devil eyes, mustaches, and alien antennae. Racist, sexist, or classist ads get their heavy-handed retorts. And people who simply think an advertised product is of poor quality won't hesitate to say so. In contrast with other forms of graffiti, this stuff is never signed.

Many steps are taken to reduce graffiti these days. Stations tagged with extensive graffiti today will be repainted by tomorrow. Buildings near subway lines have taken to putting barbed wire on top. Poster ads are rotated monthly. And the trains themselves are now constructed of a steel hull that simply won't hold spray paint through a good washing.

But all the precautions in the world aren't enough to stifle free expression in a busy city where so many people feel lost or ignored. Stations in less some affluent areas have given up the fight altogether.

To eliminate graffiti, we'd have to eliminate the conditions that spawn it. But oddly enough, the people who protest about graffiti the most are often the ones most responsible for creating our shared conditions and the ones least likely to agree to any needed changes on a large social scale. So I imagine graffiti will be the poor man's art board and soap box for quite a while longer. And rightfully so.

Down the road from my house, on a wall behind the police station, it has been written that:

THE GREATEST SECRET OF THE STATE IS THE MISERY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Its been up there for much more than a year now.

Most things around this area (northeast London) tend to get tagged or redecorated - and the range goes from felt-tips at the bus stop to artistic or political stuff.

http://www.artofthestate.co.uk/subpages/pgphotoGRAFFITIfiesta.htm

Banksy certainly deserves a mention, and here are some pics of his stensil graffiti that my flatmate took.

http://www.fivesevenyc.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/pictures/Banksy.htm

I really like his stuff, and think that a bit of graffiti really can add something to our culture that would otherwise have nowhere to be.

I think I'm more annoyed by the constant adverts and in your face billboards everywhere that invade public space than I am by the graffiti.