Tag You're It, Part I

I was headed to the Arts Forum Mayor Sly was holding, but I was early. Got off work early, plus I had a huge tailwind leaving work, so I got downtown faster than even free beer and art would normally account for.

I'm a fan of tag art and the 'legal wall' murals that are the well-mannered cousins of tags.

Down the alley from some of the great pieces I found was this warning to 'taggers' that their efforts won't make it to the next day. I wonder how early the poster of this sign gets up to make good on this warning.

Though even in that little cove, there are murals, a hanged canvas of Bogie, and even the defaced tags have a sort of hip, urban esthetic.

It's funny, I actually get angry when I see tags covered over by the city. I lost it when I saw they'd splotched gray paint on Frost, a tag that was on a cliff wall likely outside the legit turf of the city cleanup crew.

Frost on the limestone wasn't a blight on the city, but with those splotches of gray on it, it kinda became one. I was enraged that just because some idiots with Krylon can't tell art from vandalism, that some other idiots got paid by the government to go cover up both art and vandalism.

I know, that old question, 'but is it art?' There's a drum solo by that name somewhere in my CD collection.

If you can't tell whether or not something is art, in my opinion, you are disqualified from judging art and vandalism. It's not hard, I do it all the time. If you can't, maybe you're the visual arts equivalent of tone deaf and should content yourself with whatever the visual arts version of Country Western music is and leave the walls alone.

But I met Sikes the night I took all these pictures, at the Mayor's arts forum. Sikes is the author of some of these pieces, and when I got to that subject he laughed it off. It's part of the game; it gives him a fresh canvas to create on; there are cities far less tolerant than Kansas City; and so on.

I shouldn't have been surprised, I've heard this stuff second hand before. I still think art has value, so I still get angered when art is destroyed. Plus, if you take copyright law to its logical conclusion, defacing, scrubbing or otherwise destroying a tag is violating the artist's copyright.

I don't bother watermarking the photos I post on this blog to claim it, but I own copyright to all the photos you see in Lobsterland. I own it the second I depress the shutter button, even if the photo is a piece of shit. I don't have to register it (though if I cared about enforcing my copyright, it would be smart), I own it, flat out. You cannot reproduce, alter or destroy it without my consent.

Relax, bro, I know we live in the digital age. I'm not foolish enough to think I could actually go around kicking people's asses for stealing my photos. Every once in a while I get an email from someone asking permission to reuse one of my shots, and I've never refused. I'm flattered that they were polite enough to do what they are actually bound by law to do, and since this is an utterly non-commercial venture, it's not like they're sapping me of profits and royalties.

That said, copyright is really fucking important to the arts. Someone who feeds themselves with their art, it's as immoral as it is illegal to steal their intellectual property.

I've heard of cases where mural artists were actually able to block the demolition of a building because they would not sign away their rights and allow their art to be destroyed. I'm sure it takes armies of lawyers to pull this off if the demolition is planned by an even modestly connected developer, but still: if an artist owns the copyright to the work, does the fact that their art was illegally placed negate all of their rights?

It might, I don't know the case law on the subject, but the offices of government responsible for tag removal are not the same offices of government where you ply your copyright cases, so it ought to be possible for a tagger to take civil action against a government agency that destroys his art without necessarily admitting his guilt to a crime some other government agency is in charge of enforcing, right?

But then, if guys like Sikes tell me I should go soak my head, maybe it's not worth fighting over.

Obviously, the bad guys haven't wiped out tag art in this town, or I wouldn't have so many shots from just Monday night that I need to break it into multiple blog posts.