Graffiti and Class

When the subject of typographic history arises in conversation, I find the discussion often follows a similar question and answer path. Who invented type? Steve Gutenburg. What was the first book he wrote? The bible. Why does this matter to anyone? Because how else would we have high-minded discourse at cocktail parties?

In reality, type has always had two faces, two sides, two reasons for existing. Stated plainly, type is either high class or low class. Are the words printed in the New York Times or are they scratched into the window of a New York Subway? Is the nobility analyzing poetry or are the commoners discussing fornication?

Here we see two examples of graffiti separated by roughly two-thousand years. Both were written on walls without consent of the owner. Both seek to communicate with a wide audience, but only one individual reader at a time.

The Latin graffiti depicts a mundane re-imagination of a widely-known work of fiction. In the original epic poem, Virgil begins by saying “I sing of Arms and a Man” and proceeds to narrate the thousand-page story of the cultural hero Aeneas and how he founded Rome. The graffiti tag here remixes this famous quote to read “I sing of laundry workers, not arms and a man”. What really matters to a society: a single famous man or ten thousand laundry workers?

Graffiti has the potential to represent the most eloquent and well resolved statements from the lowest class of society. When appropriately applied, the graffito tag can empower the powerless with weaponized language. Maybe it speaks truth to authority or maybe it crudely narrates the human experience in a way no stuffy high-class periodical ever could.

But what of type itself? Does a message seem trite when written in chalk on a wall and does that same message seem profound if printed on a newspaper? If graffiti is trying to play the game of typography, it is losing, right? Not so much. It seems that when society applies centuries of development onto an outsider art, that art becomes honed to perfection nomatter how vulgar its inception.