Dialogue: When writing's on the wall just turn a blind eye

I have never understood why the sight of graffiti pushes some people so close to the brink. They take graffiti as a personal insult.

I always watch these people with great interest. I wonder what it'd be like to care so much. Graffiti, after all, is only graffiti - perfectly immaterial writing on the wall.

It's not pretty, but very little in the urban landscape is pretty. It's hard to understand why urban-dwellers find graffiti a specific insult, in visual terms.

Unlike much of the rest of the urban landscape, graffiti may be easily removed. It may be painted over. It may also be ignored, ignoring it being by far the best way of denying graffiti artists a response.

But people want to find graffiti insulting.

There is probably not too much that one can do to help those who have tagging out of perspective, which is a pity because I sometimes want to help when exposed to the agonies of those who cannot handle graffiti.

I had a teacher in form 2 who was a classic instance of the sort of individual I am talking about.Every day at morning assembly he would lose his rag about the graffiti he kept finding in the girls' and boys' bathrooms.

This ire was as hilarious as it was futile.

"Somebody wrote Bum and Boobies on the wall in the junior boys' toilets," he would screech, spitting and flapping his hands.

We, needless to say, would be sitting on the floor of the assembly hall, dying of laughter. Those who were laughing the most violently would be sent off to clean the offending graffiti from the latrine wall.

As soon as we'd finished, and the wall was perfectly clean, the original tag artist would reappear and reapply his original statement.

Next day, poor old Bob would climb the podium at assembly and bring the house down with another unfortunate speech about teaching us to draw titties if it killed him. (That is a direct quote.)

At no point could Bob bring himself to ignore the graffiti - an approach that probably would have solved the problem in an afternoon.

Same goes with people today. I've heard people say that they find graffiti as offensive as rape. I've wondered how people manage to permit themselves to draw that sort of comparison.

Painting a likeness of your own genitalia on a flyover support-beam in the middle of the night is hardly the same as perpetrating a violent attack on another human being.

Anyone who can't tell the difference needs to start trying to. The difference is, of course, that graffiti is ultimately harmless. And it is meaningless, too - particularly if you ignore it.

Graffiti is entirely about goading the public (and probably, in the first instance, the police) into some sort of reaction. Without the reaction, graffiti doesn't exist.

That's why even the so-called great graffiti artists, such as Keith Haring, don't stand up too well out of context. Hang a Keith Haring in an art gallery, and the little characters look too simple, and one-dimensional, and even pointless - like children's drawings, minus the intent.

As graffiti on the walls of a railway station, the drawings had some resonance and an immediacy, mainly because they were surrounded by commuters asking each other what they were.

Likewise the markings on the walls at places such as the Tower of London.

The markings mean little until a yeoman of the guard with an appropriate, if camped-up, sense of the dramatic tells you those markings may have been made by Elizabeth, or the little princes before they disappeared.

Pictorially, the markings, like all markings, offer as little as a Haring drawing. It is all in the response.

Why do people tear their hair out at graffiti?

It's unpleasant to look at, but so are most aspects of the urban scene.

Why not simply pretend that it doesn't exist?