Graffiti's canvas is changing

PROVO — Graffiti has slowly been making its way into circles of fine art despite the common perception of this spray-paint medium as trashy and vandalistic.

Although government officials have been working overtime to stop a growing graffiti trend in Provo — Provo Mayor Lewis Billings recently announced the creation of a new hotline to report the crime — museums are beginning to view these colorful creations as masterpieces.

Last summer, Brooklyn Museum presented a two-month, full-scale exhibit devoted to graffiti, and other museums are looking at the art form in a new light.

Marian Wardle, curator of American art at Brigham Young University's Museum of Art, said she thinks graffiti might appear in the university's museum someday, although there are no immediate plans for an exhibit.

"I think it has value as an expression of our culture and therefore is worth studying," Wardle said.

Despite the art world's budding interest in the medium, graffiti artists are not welcome in most neighborhoods, where their work most often appears on walls and the sides of buildings.

Thayne Fagg, who lives in Provo and attends a dental vocational school in Draper, reserves graffiti for the canvas these days, but, at one time, his art could be seen on out-of-the-way walls in Las Vegas, his hometown.

He started "tagging" in high school after a classmate saw him doodling and offered to show him how to translate his drawings into spray-paint graffiti. After that, Fagg tagged often, although he soon turned to legal methods, asking local business owners if he could decorate the rear part of their stores.

However, Fagg said, it's difficult to find opportunities to do graffiti legally.

"Legal sponsors are few and far between, so lots of people just find a spot (in public)," he said. "I did quite a bit (illegally). It's hard to get all the practice you need to get pretty good without doing a fair amount of illegal graffiti."

But practicing an art form isn't the only motive for many taggers, Fagg said.

"It's the rush — just the adrenaline of it (and) the possibility of getting caught," Fagg said.

Joe Ostraff, a BYU professor of art, said the motives for graffiti are probably as diverse as those involved. However, he said many graffiti artists do what they do because there aren't many other avenues through which they can present their ideas.

For many of those who clean up graffiti, though, there's no excuse for taggers' illegal behavior. Andrea Perri, a project coordinator at Action Target, a local business that gets hit by taggers often, said she thinks graffitists use "art" as an excuse to justify their actions.