Certainly graffiti here was more than vandalism, it was art, and I cannot have been the only one to think so since it was never scrubbed away. This is a sanitised example of graffiti in everyday life, as is the intellectualised pub philosophy scrawled on the walls of my local. More often modern graffiti is just a name, a mark that someone was there at a date, a tag. It is in the back lots, the railway sidings, the derelict inner cities. It is illegal.
Modern graffiti has a bad press.
In America it is, wrongly in most cases, associated with violence and gang territory. Here we associate it with the ills of society, a mindless vandalism, a lack of anything else to do. To begin with, Graffiti has a long history, which could be stretched to the cave paintings of prehistoric man. A name applied originally to the wall scribblings found at Pompeii and other Italian cities, the work of school boys, idlers, etc., many of them obscene and accompanied by rough drawings. A collection of graffiti of Pompeii was published by Bishop Wordsworth in 1837 and it provides a useful insight into the life of the ancient Romans.