Graffiti & Street Art: Biting Wit and Social Commentary

This isn't what I planned to write today, but I have been thinking  a lot lately about the witty bits of graffiti and street art I've been seeing on the web in recent days, and how it incorporates social commentary with cleverness and witty appraisals of the social scene.

Graffiti seems to fall into several broad categories.

• Pornographic/scatological (the kind usually reserved for bathroom walls - we really don't need an example, do we?) 

• Works of art (that can include "tagging", but usually not).  This is impressive:

• Stenciling and "plain text" type of comments:

• And the kind I'm considering here - additions, addendums, and annotations to existing messages.

In other words, this sort of thing:















Some quick spray paint work, and two utility boxes share an embrace.  Seems kind of simple - but is it?  Is it too far-fetched to wonder why the artist chose this particular design?  There really is nothing about a pair of plain utility boxes set in a field that naturally indicates the need for a hug.  Perhaps it is more than a clever design - rather, a comment on how we humans often find ourselves side-but-side, yet afraid to share even the most basic type of intimacy with another person.

Then there's this:



A clever play on words, certainly.  But is it also a comment on how "parking" is replacing the green spaces once reserved for "parks"? It reads that way to me.

This isn't to imply everything has an underlying social meaning, some of these annotations are really just a chance to be silly with no real subtext:



Still, if you hold constructionist/constructivist views, believing that we as individuals and as a society construct meaning and apply them to objects, you have to start  looking differently at these alternations that to seem combine biting wit and social comment:

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