For most people, graffiti can be described as today’s crude and petty act of destruction. This, however, is corrected in the remainder of A Brief History of Graffiti, which seeks to explain why the descriptor is wrong in all forms. In this video, art historian Dr. Richard Clay documents curb-side scrawls from around the globe and through time, from prehistoric doodles in France to notes left in a Russian building in Berlin by the liberating allies in 1945 to graffiti.
By doing so, Dr. Clay brings us to the understanding that cavemen were also practicing graffiti painting, that graffiti, in its essence, is an art form of those who do not know how else to paint, and that there is a clear distinction between vandalism and street art.
