When Aerosol Outlaws Became Insiders: Graffiti Art at the Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum has been criticized for exhibitions like "Hip-Hop Nation" and "Star Wars" that seem to blur the line between education and popular entertainment. Is "Graffiti," another show presumably with popular appeal, more of the same? Yes and no.

On the downside, the 20 aerosol spray paintings from the early 1980's on display, including works by once-famous graffiti artists, like Daze, Crash and Lady Pink, are negligible as works of art. And it does not help that the exhibition's designers have erected walls within the main gallery, where children are invited to create graffiti themselves.

On the other hand, though it does not go into its subject as deeply as it could have, the exhibition represents an interesting and possibly instructive sociological episode in recent art history: the story of an unusual convergence of avant-garde high culture and grass-roots youth culture, with each side bringing its own sets of values, understandings and aspirations.

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