Graffiti lends legitimacy to big brands

Graffiti and Street Art used to be the realm of the underground, yet recent years have seen a surge in major brands adopting street style and art in an effort to make their products appealing to a younger audience and gain credibility amongst teens. Once frowned upon, and exclusively found in poor beaten-down districts of bustling multicultural cities, graffiti is now on the high street as hip and cool and, ultimately mainstream. This post attempts to trace some of the background to graffiti and street art as well as outline some of the more outright blatant attempts by big brands at co-opting graffiti and the street art ethos as ways of signalling the coolness of their products.

The word "graffiti" derives from the Greek word graphein meaning: to write. This evolved into the Latin word graffito. Graffiti is the plural form of graffito. Simply put, graffiti is a drawing, scribbling or writing on a flat surface. Today, we equate graffiti with the "New   York" or "Hip Hop" style which emerged from New York City in the 1970's. However, graffiti and street art is much bigger than that, it is a feature of any major city in the world and increasingly inspiring toys, action figures, fashion, interior design, even town planning as it beginning to be seen not as a destructive element, but as an art form giving dynamism and expression to an otherwise dull city-scape.

Hip hop: Fueling the Fire
This change has escalated, mainly because of music and Hip Hop in particular. Hip Hop was originally an inner city concept. It evolved from the rap music made in Brooklyn and Harlem in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Donald Clarke, a music historian, has written that rap music was a reaction to the disco music of the period. Disco was centered in the rich, elitist clubs of Manhattan and rap emerged on street corners as an alternative. Using lyrical rhythms and 'beat boxing' the music was a way to express feelings about inner-city life. Hip hop emerged as turn tables began to be used to form part of the rhythm by `scratching' (the sound created by running the stylus over the grooves of an LP).   

Keith Haring and Taki 183 as catalysts
As Hip Hop music emerged so did a new outlet for artistic visibility. Keith Haring began using posters to place his uniquely drawn figures and characters in public places. Soon he began to draw directly on subway walls and transit posters. The uniqueness of his drawings eventually led to their being shown in galleries and published in books and his art became "legitimate".

At about the same time as Keith Haring, a delivery messenger began writing "Taki 183" whenever he delivered documents. Soon his name was all over the city. Newspapers and magazines wrote articles about him and Keith Haring. Both became celebrities. This claim to fame attracted many young people, especially those involved with rapping. They began to imitate "Taki 183".    

Graffiti culture
Graffiti was incorporated into the Hip Hop culture and became a sort of triad with rapping and break dancing . Breakdancing has since lost much of its initial popularity, while rapping has emerged as a major style in American music. New York City was inundated with graffiti during the late seventies and early eighties. But as media coverage faded so do did the graffiti. Then in the mid-eighties a national TV program did a graffiti story and set off a graffiti wildfire which has become world-wide.   

Graffiti quickly became a social scene. Friends often form crews of vandals. One early crew wrote TAG as their crew name, an acronym for Tuff Artists Group. Tag has since come to mean both     graffiti writing, 'tagging' and graffiti, a 'tag'. Crews often tag together, writing both the crew tag and their own personal tags. Graffiti has its own language with terms such as: piece, toy, wild-style, and racking.

The changing face of graffiti
As graffiti has grown, so too has its character. What began as an urban lower-income protest, nationally, graffiti now spans all racial and economic groups. While many inner-city kids are still heavily involved in the graffiti culture, one tagger recently caught in Philadelphia was a 27 year old stockbroker who drove to tagging sites in his BMW. Styles have dramatically evolved from the simple cursory style, which is still the most prevalent, to intricate interlocking letter graphic designs with multiple colors called pieces (from masterpieces).    

Graffiti gone commercial
Street Campaign Graffiti shops, both retail and on-line, sell a wide variety of items to taggers. Caps, markers, magazines, T-shirts, backpacks, shorts with hidden pockets, even drawing books with templates of different railroad cars can be purchased. Over 25,000 graffiti sites exist on the world wide web, the majority of these are pro-graffiti. Moreover, the character designs emerging from graffiti have spawned their very own culture around adult collectable vinyl figures, some fetching many hundreds of pounds. Now graffiti and street culture are the must-have items of viral campaigns, the stamp of guaranteed coolness, the way to rejuvenate brands.

The Hummer (above)campaign, where traditional poster prints have been replaced by graffiti works, has been seen as a sell-out by many in the graffiti community and subject to defacing attacks, where tags like 'Scam', 'get a bicycle' and more profane language is sprayed over the works.

Adidas did their spin on using graffiti by providing blank posters with minimal branding, inviting graffiti artists to paint on the billboards. See article at Concept Bakery.

Also check out How to Plan a Viral Marketing Campaign at the Wooster Collective. A tongue-in-cheek account of how to use street art to add credibility to your brand or exploit the art to create your own popular vinylfigures and make a fortune.

LINK LOG:

Obey Giant AKA Andre the Giant. A street art project and an experiment in phenomenology by artist and skateboarder Shepard Fairey. Stickers, posters, links and simply a must-read

KidRobot What's all the fuss about vinyl figures? Check out the coolest on-line shop for more info.

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I think using street art as advertising is awful. We are surrounded by ads everywhere, and I don't want to see them on every wall in my city too

[Audiolathe]

Very true. However there are also signs that the attitude to this may be changing in places - in Barcelona you will find entire blocks covered with great murals that change every week and artists are invited to decorate the protective walls of building sites. This lends both colour and interest to otherwise dull areas. Similar initiatives exist in London and New York, but as you rightly say - graffiti and tagging even more so is seen as a nuisance.

Therefore trying to appeal to a target audience by adopting a slightly risqué art-form as opposed to endorsing what is considered a nuisance is a fine balance indeed.

[KlausinLA]

There are still a lot of places where Grafitti can get you into a lot of trouble. Many cities don't like it at the walls because they look at it as signs of Gang activity.

I heard of situations here in Los Angeles where business owners paid for artists to put some Grafitti on their storefront.
They later on were ordered to remove the artwork. For the records: this is "liberal" California.