These days if you do much reading about cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology you’re likely to read attempts to explain art as a way of signaling something. In one version it’s the genetic fitness of the artist. The more elaborate the art, the fitter the artist and, so goes the theory, the more likely the artist is to bed all the hot babes. In another version the art signals allegiance to a group, with different groups favoring different motifs and styles.
I’m skeptical about such theories. Group signaling doesn’t demand much more than, for example, that one group wear red shirts and another wear blue shirts. Yes, different groups will favor different styles, but there’s more to those styles than simply telling the differences between the Reds and the Blues. Similarly, it seems to me that, as a fitness signal, art is overkill. Art works exhibit high dimensionality — I’m thinking abstractly here, where the dimensions are about the content of the work, not the surface or volume where the work is executed — and so differ along 10s and 100s of dimensions. But fitness is generally conceptualized as having low dimensionality, like one. What’s the artist doing with all those extra dimensions?
Modern graffiti, however, does exhibit simple signaling dynamics. As far as we know, the practice started in Philadelphia and then New York City as a way for boys to signal their presence. They’d mark their names on walls, not their legal names, but their graffiti names, thus signifying their existence. In fact, the story goes that a Philly writer named Cornbread wanted to get the attention of a girl — score one for evolutionary psychology. The more a writer “got up” the more widely he would be known.
Such straightforward competition is still very much a part of the graffiti world. Look at this photo, which I took on 21 November 2006:
Notice how the tagging goes up the wall. That simple ladder has been there ever since I’ve been photographing the wall. For all I know, some graffiti writers built it just so they could go up the wall with their tags as the tree branches on the tree are too small to support much weight.
On the one hand, there are more tags there, and larger ones, as other writers have shown that they too could climb the ladder and tag up. Look at the very top and you’ll see that someone’s tagged above the top of the ladder, thereby beating all the other writers in this particular competition.
Finally, consider this photo, over two years later (23 April 2010):
The space around the ladder is now rather filled with tags, with more recent writers clearly going over older ones and thus, in a sense, claiming victory over them. Moreover, the highest tags are now even higher than those in the previous photo. It’s not clear how much further that particular competition can go.
The important point is that, to a first approximation, these tags all display roughly the same level of skill. Yes, the tags differ in various ways, and anyone who’s seen a wide variety of tags recognizes different levels of skill. But those differences aren’t what’s most important going up the wall. What’s being displayed up that wall is one’s athletic prowess, daring, and determination: Do you have what it takes to climb up the wall and put your tag on it?
That’s pretty much where graffiti was in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s. Get your tag on the wall, get it on as many walls as possible, and get it into places where no one else has gone or can go. That’s how you score points and win fame. Then things began to change, and you can see those beginnings in Jon Naars photos in The Faith of Graffiti. Some of those names are considerably bigger and more elaborate than others. Here’s what Susan Farrell* wrote to me a few years back; she’s referring to the evolutionary dynamic that emerged in the early and middle 1970s:
Often in academic writing, graffiti is referred to as having a "prestige economy." The original writers were trying to become famous by spreading their names. They wanted all the other writers to know their names, and they wanted to get in the newspaper if possible. Making their names bigger, brighter, and more decorated was the way to stand out from the crowd. So everything you see in graffiti today was developed as part of the visual arms race for attention and fame. Quickly innovation became an intrinsic good, and those who invented a new technique or flourish named it and claimed it. Many people in NYC can still tell you who started with arrows, bits, outlines, force-fields, shines (reflective starring), backgrounds, clouds and so on.
The effect of all this innovation is that you can no longer get up so quickly, so often, and in the most difficult spots. If you really want to show your chops you need to be physically secure, you need to be able to carry and work with 10s of cans of paint, and you need to have the time to do it.
Here’s a shot of the Taboo piece that’s at the base of that column (23 February 2008):
As pieces go, it’s not particularly elaborate, but it’s more than you could do while handing from a rickety ladder by one hand. Notice that Taboo has signed it with his tag at the left, with the name of his crew (DYM) and a year (’08) above that, with the names of other crew members, TENZ and HOST, in the lower right.
Now, at what point does the intrinsic pleasure of doing the work itself — whatever that pleasure is — when does that pleasure become as important as any fame you can accrue simply from getting up?
In the area where I’ve been photographing graffiti, the best stuff tends to be the most isolated. The stanchions in those photos above are relatively isolated. While access is not difficult, providing you know where to find the holes in the fence, there isn’t a great deal of foot traffic there. A writer who goes there in the late evening or early morning will have a few hours in which to do a respectable piece. But the only people who’ll ever see those pieces are other graffiti writers, the locals who walk there as a shortcut between one place and another, the homeless people to live back there, and the railroad police. When executing these pieces, these writers are talking with one another, not with the public at large. And they aren’t just talking about who’s can get up more and higher. They’re talking about style.
And what is that, this style?
Finally, I’d like to make an observation about signaling, but not signaling among artists, or graffiti writers, or between artists the public. What about signaling among art collectors? When collectors pay middle and high eight-figure prices (US dollars), and even low nine-figure prices, those prices have little to do with the quality of the work being sold. These collectors are signaling their wealth, mostly to one another rather than to the world at large. These prices are being paid in a high-end art market that’s also glutted with pretentious garbage of one sort or another — I’m thinking particularly of Damien Hirst’s various pickled animals, but of course they’re only one example.
I can’t help but think we’re got a surfeit of signal-money chasing a scarcity of art. And so dealers and poseurs rush into the vacuum with intellectually pretentious goods to sop up the money. This con game is made especially easy by the fact that the world doesn’t know where it’s going, and so can’t figure out just what counts as art anymore. The superrich, of course, like nothing better to know they they’ve got destiny by the short hairs and they signal this to their peers by buying up the garbage.
ADDENDUM: All of which is to say that the phenomenon of graffiti gives us a way of thinking how the relatively simple dynamics of competitive signaling can lead to something that’s beyond those dynamics. That doesn’t mean that those dynamics disappear, that they no longer have any force. They’re still operative. But something else is going on and it now dominates the activity.
ADDENDUM 2: A post on the state of this wall as of 24 Sept 2011.
ADDENDUM 2: A post on the state of this wall as of 24 Sept 2011.
* Farrell is a graffiti expert who created Art Crimes, the oldest graffiti site on the web.
No comments:
Post a Comment