These articles discussed the significance of placement for graffiti. There is an idea that graffiti attracts graffiti. Many walls are either blank or covered in graffiti, with little room in between.
Van Eck discusses the differences between devotional and social location. Devotional leaves a mark that doesn’t self identify, while social connects the artist and leaves part of their identity. Graffiti is public and permanent in placement, and viewers are therefore forced to see it. This can be compared to a billboard on a highway. Both graffiti and signs are forms of exposed writing. The contemporary view of graffiti is vandalism. Van Eck argues that graffiti was not always accepted and today sometimes is vandalism and sometimes is not. This introduces the question of if commissioned murals are graffiti. If graffiti is intentional and planned, is it graffiti?
Baker says that the way we dedicated buildings to families and benefactors is to write names on an outside of a building as a label. This was the same during the medieval times. There was a large emphasis on labeling with names, and this points to why names are the most common form of graffiti today. With that, medieval history is very much international, and this shows in the graffiti. Graffiti is very specific to place and individual.
Graves asks why people write on walls of religious buildings. The answer is likely out of boredom. Many people would have been waiting outside to enter these buildings during the medieval times. Many people also cross out names, rather than erase or transform them. These people want viewers to be able to see what was there before, but also change its meaning by crossing it out. Lastly, the Christodoulou and Satraki article uses graffiti to understand changes in the power and history of space. I think this is an important takeaway. While graffiti is dependent on the space it is in, the space is also dependent on graffiti for shaping its cultural history.