Seven Red

Following up on graffiti energy drinks and Delft China, it’s not all bad.

We can shake our fists at the sky over the “co-opting” forces of capital, etc., but these forms of refusal never get much mileage, in my view. Soon the fist-waving itself becomes profitable, and we’re meta-waving, and on and on. But we also see that other things can happen. Sunday’s New York Times Magazine will feature a story on KR ONE, an old school graffiti guy from Queens who mixed his own silver ink for marker tags. He now sells that ink (Krink, or KR – ink) to high end designers and other artists.

I have a hard time getting bent about such transformations: graffiti allowed the guy to invent something. Indeed, that might be graffiti’s most interesting aspect. It shows us an entire subculture developing previously inconceivable or barely conceivable problems and trying to solve them. Maybe more on this theme later. That said, I love this sentence from the article:

Growing up in Queens in the 1980s, Costello was exposed to an earlier iteration of graffiti. This was back when a lot more people called it rank vandalism, and “street art” had yet to become a tactic used to market cars and electronics — or a look mimicked by tony fashion designers.

Ain’t that the truth.

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