Baird and Taylor note the ubiquity and acceptance of ancient graffiti to conclude that the practice was “not (in most incidences) considered defacing,” asserting the misguidedness of “modern ideas about the illicit nature of the activity” (16).
This raises the question of how evolving understandings of space, expression and the interaction therein have fomented the changing attitudes towards graffiti, and implications regarding how academics may derive value from the study of graffiti.
The researchers note that their work “demonstrates the diversity” of graffiti, whose “non-monumental, private and often spontaneous nature” may reflect “in a more direct way than other categories of inscription the thoughts and feelings of people.” At the same time, the researchers reject the implicit understanding of graffiti as pertaining to the “low class,” noting examples of graffiti on the interior walls of wealthy households (15). This heterogeneity of graffiti is evidenced in the myriad Pompeian inscriptions – literary, political, personal names, greetings, erotic texts, pictorials of animals or ships and abstract drawings e.g. – which reveal a liberal view of space and expression (2).
However, In 1970s New York e.g., urban graffiti were more often “held up as representing a socio-cultural otherness,” as Zadorojnyi puts it, rather than used to understand the socialization of space and objects as in Volioti’s chapter on the materiality of writing on the physical surface (14). Mayors such as Ed Koch and the MTA’s “War on Graffiti” revive rather Mau’s “blanket assumptions” of wall art in Pompeii as not belonging to the “people with whom we should most eagerly desire to come into contact, the cultivated men and women of the ancient city” (2).
The otherization of graffiti reflects a spatial manifestation of broad otherizations. For example, in 1970s New York, Austin’s New Rome built “across the back” of the Naked City enabled politicians to curry favor as protectors. The attitudes displayed in Mau’s study of Pompei and the Greco-Roman literary elite’s view of graffiti e.g. likely stem from such political framing stories (5). However, Baird and Taylor show that study of graffiti is most valuable when it considers graffiti as a means by which to understand the socialization of space and explores the interaction of the writing and the physical surface.