NOW you see it… Legalese of Street Art

By Irina Tarsis, Esq.

Did you know that some street artists pay building owners for the right to paint graffiti? If so, it is almost as jarring as finding a tag on your business shutters early in the morning. What a synergistic example of the seemingly disparate interests: artistic, economic and legal -- satisfied. According to Wilfredo Feliciano, a.k.a. Bio, quoted in a recent TNYT article, his group of street artists have been paying up to $1,000 for the right to paint ads and personal pieces on the streets of New York for years. Of course, paying to paint graffiti is probably an exception to the rule of the self-expression form that began as a subversion and turned into a social-cultural manifestation of the working class. Graffiti is still considered a crime and New York City still has a task force (Citywide Vandals Task Force) that is dedicated to battling vandalism of property by graffiti offenders (a rose by any other name).

Truth be told, graffiti and tags are ubiquitous in our post-industrial world. From Los Angeles to Vilnius, aerosol art, better known as graffiti, saturates walls of urban landscape. It is a phenomenon that started probably around the time when aerosol/spray paints became available to the general public.