Outlaw art.

• Author: McNeil, Joanne
• Position: Briefly Noted - Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York's Urban Underground - Brief article - Book review

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"Writers talk all the time that they won't write graffiti on churches, on private property, on people's houses," one graffiti "writer" told sociologist Gregory Snyder in Snyder's book Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York's Urban Underground (NYU Press). If true, this complicates the traditional objection to graffiti on property-rights grounds. Another graffiti writer quotes Sam Keen. "While the rebel is merely rejecting the established, the outlaw is motivated by a quest for self-government."

In the mid-1990s, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani ignored such airy theorizing. Motivated by the "broken...