Knoxville has sanctioned public art around town, but it also has a lot of street art, unsanctioned and appearing mysteriously overnight or over time. The boarded-up storefronts on Wall Avenue downtown, right around the corner from Market Square, are known to many people as the "graffiti wall". It collected the usual kinds of graffiti, a chronicle of who loves whom, peoples' initials, and so forth. But then local artists began to paint the wall, creating an ethereal mural of different styles and visions. People started visiting Wall Avenue just to see the art.Unfortunately, an overzealous city program to remove tagging and other graffiti painted over all the beautiful art, leaving a red-brown wasteland.
But new art has come back to the wall. Here are some of the latest murals, by artists unknown. I'll show some more in the next few days.
Of course, since anarchy reigns in the world of graffiti, these murals often have more graffiti layered over them, which presents an interesting conundrum. Do you think that counts as "vandalism", or are all things fair in love and graffiti?
Thanks to St. Louis Daily Photo for the inspiration for this topic (some months ago, but I finally got around to posting it).
5 comments:
A hard call, but there is a difference, mural scenes are art. tagging, or graffiti is not. Either way, this is quite the artwork in this mural.
Definitely inspired by Vincent Van Gogh I should say.
I guess art requires effort and is pleasing to look at. Graffiti and tagging are mainly random destruction
The murals are nice. It's a shame someone tagged them...is there NO honor among anonymous street graffiti artists?
A truly interesting post. And an even more interesting question.
Despite the tagging, let's go with art. I would rather let the odd rubbish graffiti through in the hope of finding some decent talent.
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