The Modern Graffiti Market

I found a site (http://www.graffitiartnewyork.com/) and thought I'd look up what our graffiti friends from PBS's Style Wars (1983) are up to in their late-middle age...

This is TAKI 183's only work up on the website (I enlarged a lot in hopes of reading some of the smaller text). Most artists linked only two or three.




A modern work by TAKI 183 (made in 2010), selling for $350.
Highly ironic that the piece is "signed on reverse,"
as if that it is the signature that really counts for something.

Whereas TAKI 183's here looks like it is tagging-focused, SEEN seems as if he is trying to have his work appear as a close-up of a more traditionally-artistic, complicated, bright, complex signature that he might have once painted on a train (also for $350):



Both artists' work are less than 2ft by 2ft in size....what??!!!  That's out of character.  Additionally, SEEN's picture used "marker," which I would guess does not allow for much color layering.  TAKI 183 used "silkscreen print"...which seems a little to complicated or fancy for what I'd expect.  But who am I to judge?  Why must we box graffiti artists into the exact type of work they've completed before?  Can't their work evolve as the culture evolves, just like any other art?  What exactly do we define as "graffiti-art," anyway?  Doesn't that imply that it must be somehow trying to defy some institution/law?

Both SEEN and TAKI 183 do sort of defy standards by listing the colors of the work as his title, for ex., "red and black."  And TAKI 183 titles his "Taki183"...a self-portrait?

Also interesting is that SEEN opened a tattoo parlor (Tattoo Seen) that became one of the most successful in NY, and that he now has an exhibit on display in Paris.

Haha but look what I found?




BLADE specifically lists in his "materials"
for this that he made it on an "NYC Subway Map" :)
Can you see the lines behind the signature?

It also looks like many of these guys ended up at the same high school: High School of Art & Design.  And yet it was the ones who majored in art and conformed a little more to the "norms" or art are the ones whose works are being sold for higher prices.  This one is selling for $5000, by an artist who had a solo show at an art gallery in the Bronx by 1982.





Crafted in 2010 by DAZE, this is on canvas,
with perhaps a more standard title: "Nightshade."
Not to say that DAZE is trying at all to fit any expectations or not fit them
but for some reason his works just strike me as a bit more mainstream.
(Wait...which are graffiti artists trying to do now?
Do they have to by definition redefine expectations to continue being "graffiti" artists?
But how is the same genre if they change styles too much?!!)
P.S. I feel like Howie with such a long caption.

Illuminating the Blue Spotlight

The spotlight that randomly appears to track Gunnar the night of Yoshiko's "first craving" is perhaps one of the most unlikely aspects of Beatty's novel.  Even Gunnar acknowledges how bizarre it is by introducing himself to the 7-Eleven clerk like an alien, "with a robotic 'Take me to your leader' " (216).  Interestingly, the spotlight begins to attract attention and allow for Friday-night parties, instead of scaring everyone away.  Even more strange is that "drug dealers have their say" and "hoodlums...bare their souls [with] black gunny-sacks stretched over the heads of the wanted ones to prevent the police from using an overhead skycam to identify them" (221) at these gatherings.  The people probably know that the police could easily capture and arrest these people, but for some reason they keep their distance and never intervene.

What is going on here?  Beatty could literally be implying that Gunnar's and Yoshiko's lives are now "spotlighted" in the national eye, no matter what they are doing.  In fact, they advertise and consciously gather an audience for what might otherwise be a very private, family-level experience: giving birth to a baby.  Perhaps they imagine their whole community as family, and that everyone should come to celebrate the life of the community.....but then how does this mesh with Gunnar's active work to convince the world to end the life of this entire community?  Perhaps the end is less fatalistic than one's emotions might imply.  Objectively, Gunnar and Yoshiko have finally found meaning in their lives, as evidenced by their willingness to die...so, paradoxically, they can now celebrate the life of their child.  To each his own...I guess....but their conviction that Gunnar feels he must die in order to fully live will never cease to be heart-wrenching.

In any case, back to the spotlight.  I wondered -- why "blue-white"?  Why not, say, green?  Or red?  Or...only white?  Blue was probably not Beatty's random choice.  As I considered Beatty's reasoning, I remembered that the first color that defined Gunnar's Elementary School view of the world was blue.  Specifically, the profanities, fantasies, municipal bus, toilet-paper grenades, and the ocean were blue.  Interestingly, Gunnar connects the blue spotlight that showed up at the end of the book when he was buying a blue slushie for Yoshiko's craving to his description of Gunnar's Elementary School definition of blue.  The Elementary School Gunnar had a "Slurpee blue" tongue (34).  And Eileen, who was Gunnar's only other love in life besides Yoshiko (and, apparently, first-base baseball player Stan "the Man" Musial (33)), had "light-saber blue eyes" that "cut through [him] like lighthouse beacons lancing in the midnight" (34).

So the spotlight in the end of the book that illuminate's Yoshiko's midnight birth is the blue of Eileen's laser-lighthouse eyes.  In both cases, Gunnar is being watched.  As Eileen watches him, he hopes that she approves of what he does, because he has a crush on her, and she is probably judging him.  But as the police watch him, they seem to care less what he does.  When Gunnar is first spotlighted, he waits for the "standard drill" of the police, but recieves "nothing" in the way of response at all (216).  As Gunnar grows more comfortable with the light's presence, he really could care less whether or not the police approves of what he does.  And neither does he try to hide away from the light.  Yoshiko describes it as "cool" (217), and both embrace (or ignore?  or take advantage of?) its presence from that point onward.

Perhaps Gunnar is trying to convince the LAPD, or anyone, for that matter, to disapprove of what he does, like Monsieur de la Croix in Bamboozled.  After Naomi's birth, when the LAPD warns that the child should have "a respect for authority," unlike Gunnar, his response is to hold up the afterbirth in defiance and state, "Thus behold the only thing mightier than yourself" (219).  But after initial trepidation for the light and Gunnar's defiant stance toward the LAPD and the world in general, everyone seems accepts everything Gunnar says and does, just like they did with his poetry.

A more sinister reading of the spotlight could view it as more of a cage than an acceptance and illumination.  "If [he] moved two feet to the left, the spotlight moved two feet to the left," keeping him "at its center" (216).  Interestingly, in Gunnar's Elementary School "abstract impressionism coloring books," he spends his time "trying [his] hardest not to stay inside the lines" (34).  So if coloring outside the lines is Gunnar's goal in life, perhaps his goal in writing poetry, then it is interesting that at the end of his life he is kept contained in the center of the beam of light.  In expanding this idea, we realize that as Gunnar's published outside-the-lines poetry becomes bestselling, what Gunnar does and says actually becomes the mainstream understanding.  He no longer even has the option of doing anything outside the lines.  Even if he is asking to plunge outside of history, he no longer can.  He is spotlighted, and his advertised plunge has gained awareness....so it becomes important to the world.

With this in mind, let us consider the fact that the beam of light is not only blue, but also white.  In Gunnar's Elementary School color definition, he defines white as "the expulsion of colors encombered by self-awareness and pigment" (35).  So we obtain the final aspect of the significance of the blue-white beam that the LAPD shines on Gunnar at night as his life draws to a close.  Along with the inside-the-lines existence that the light forces Gunnar to live, it also asks him to recognize his life as important and having worldwide significance.  There is no way around self-awareness when you are literally spotlighted.  So Gunnar's actions and experiences become all the more poignant for readers, because they understand that the whole world will see what Gunnar says and does.  But Gunnar thumbs his nose at the idea that the presence of the spotlight could affect how he views himself.  By the end of the book, Gunnar seems almost as existentialist as Meursault.  But unlike Mersault, he should recognize that the LAPD is right: his life is clearly significant to billions, and his existentialist attitude is being broadcast on national television.  Along with his stable and apparently happy family life, this should, by modern logic, absolutely cancel out Gunnar's paradoxical belief that all that matters about his life is that it ends.  But it doesn't.

Gunnar's Rap

If Ellison's novel reflects jazz tropes and Hurston's novel reflects blues tropes, then Beatty's novel reflects hip hop tropes, and explores the various stereotypes regarding hip hop artists in modern culture.

First, Gunnar has always used on-the-spot poetic or wordplay comments.  He does this both just for fun, but also often to expose social ironies, insights, or criticisms.  In Santa Monica, his seemingly MC-echoed comebacks got him the reputation of a "funny, cool, black guy."  Everyone assumes this, not only within his school, but outside of it (the doctor immediately calls him this).  Perhaps, during this period, Gunnar is seen as conforming to some of the more "Golden-Age" hip-hop styles, with its experimentalism and social commentary.

When he moves to the ghetto, the connection to hip hop culture becomes increasingly clear.  He takes a poetry class and does graffiti art...by spray-painting his poem to a wall.  He gradually begins doing more poetic work on-the-spot, starting with a poem he "composed" for Pumpkin's funeral then and there, which "signed [his] unofficial ascension to poete maudit for the Gun Totin' Hooligans and by extension the neighborhood."

But though he is living where the "Gangsta Rap"-type forms, and he has exposure to them in the streets, he is distanced from them.  When the Stoic Undertakers are filming a music video in front of Gunnar's house, the producer is very specific.  He refuses Gunnar as an extra because he is "too studious," and the producer wants" menacing or despondent," not "bookworm junior high larvae" (76).  But perhaps this is Gunnar's problem in moving from Santa Monica to the ghetto.  He had never been exposed to this idea of what people should be, before.  In his previous socialization, popular emphasis was more on humorous funk styles, whereas now he is expected to learn how to act as though people expect him to be menacing or despondent (whether or not, inwardly, people actually are).

Another aspect of hip hop that Gunnar does not yet "fit" is the dance aspect.  He claims he "couldn't dance and was deathly afraid of women" (121).  But Psycho Loco will probably fix that.  And this is the issue -- are the people in his new environment also forcing him into some image of what he should be?  I think this is clear evidence that that is so.  It is impossible for him to be part of either the Santa Monica or the ghetto social scene without somehow fitting some sort of image, or practicing some sort of behaviors.  So this is the irony -- if rap is an experimental form, how can Gunnar continue to be a rap artist and yet still experiment?  Perhaps Beatty is saying something about rap music, in general.  Not only are the producers the ones who control the tone of the music and how it is presented to the public, but the culture of the people who write the lyrics dictates much of what they can and cannot say.  Gunnar describes his poete maudit job as "immortaliz[ing] the rulers and say[ing] enough scholarly bullshit to keep from getting my head chopped off" (105).  And after the producer says "cut," Beatty describes the "sybaritic rappers and hired concubines" who are "leaning into the camera with gnarled intimidating scowls" as experiencing an effect exactly mirroring that of the minstrelsy dynamic.  The "curled lips snapped back into watermelon grins like fleshy rubber bands" and the previously-menacing despondents ask, "How was that, massa?  Menacing enough fo' ya?" (77).

What Tea Cake has against Miss Turner's brother

Tea Cake describes Miss Turner as a woman who "live offa our money and don't lak black folks, huh?" (148).  This view of Miss Turner is a more extreme version of the attitude that the people in Eatonville held for Joe.  Joe came to Eatonville with the idea of ruling over everyone else, to make the town more improved than it would be without his presence.  His first reaction to the town is: "God, they call this a town?  Why 'taint nothing but a raw place in de woods" (34).  And though his first words to the townspeople are that he "means to put man hands tuh de plow heah, and strain every nerve to make dis our town de metropolis uh de state" (42).  He clarifies this by making it clear that he will do this by making everyone do what he thinks is best for the town, and not what anyone else thinks is best or wants to do.  So he continues his initial speech by "So maybe Ah better tell yuh in case you don't know dat if we expect tuh move on, us got tuh incorporate lak every other town" (43).  Essentially from that point onward, Joe speaks as if he knows more than everyone else about running the town or how things should be done (esp. to Janie).

So when Janie and Tea Cake encounter Miss Turner, who holds a similar attitude toward the people of the muck that Joe held toward the people of Eatonville, no wonder Tea Cake is so afraid of Miss Turner's brother.  Without this parallel between Miss Turner and Joe, it would be unclear why Tea Cake is afraid of Janie's potential interest in Miss Turner's brother until he dies.  Tea Cake knows that Janie comes from high standing, and is initially afraid of fully exposing her to his low-class-ness, as evidenced by the scene where he explains how he spent Janie's $200.  Though Janie continually reassures him that this is not a problem for her, there is no evidence that Tea Cake is ever completely convinced.  So when Miss Turner comes along, and all she can talk about is how good Janie is compared to Tea Cake, how Janie should be in a more high-class situation, how she absolutely dissapproves of the rest of the town, and how her own brother is a good candidate given all of these reasons, no wonder Tea Cake becomes so worried and obsessed.  Tea Cake himself has believed (or still believes?) the same things about Janie.  Luckily, since Joe's death, Janie she is not affected by what anyone else thinks she should or should not do.  But, again, Tea Cake can't know this.  He sees Miss Turner's brother as a potential Joe-the-second, and thus a potential rival who could potentially take Janie away from him, without ever having met the brother or knowing that Joe successfully took Janie away from her previous husband.