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Graffiti artists are attempting to distance themselves from younger street taggers who, they claim, are debasing their art form through vandalism and gang culture.
Older, more established graffiti artists - or street artists, as they prefer to be called - say younger taggers are ignoring codes of behaviour or accepted rules such as not daubing schools, churches or private property.
Many of the older generation of graffiti artists who started 20 years ago are fans of acclaimed British exponent Banksy.
One of his artworks, sprayed on a wall in London's Portobello Rd, sold recently for £200,000 ($496,000) in an online auction.
The work depicted an artist in old-fashioned clothes putting the finishing touches on the word "Banksy".
It was sold on eBay for £208,100 after 69 bids.
But in New Zealand, tensions between the two groups have led to some graffiti artists claiming their high-quality works and murals are being defaced by young taggers who have no appreciation of art and are often involved in crime.
They also criticise Auckland City Council for having a zero tolerance towards graffiti and say it is squandering millions of dollars of taxpayers' money on clean-up operations that only provide a temporary solution.
The police said yesterday that it was wrong to make a distinction between tagging and graffiti as both were illegal activities that were antisocial, costly to tackle and made people in communities feel unsafe.
In one website entry, a contributor writing under the assumed name Oscar states: "The truth is that graffiti in your neighbourhood is done by people from your neighbourhood. If there's tagging in Epsom it's by kids from Epsom.
"A large number of taggers are middle and middle to upper class white kids whose parents are probably congratulating John Key on planning to install boot camps for all those little buggers, all the while giving their kids allowances to go buy montanas with.
"The truth is graffiti is to now what skateboarding was to the 90s, the cool thing to do. In every school there are bunches of kids who smoke, spit and generally test their teenage spirit with anti-social activity, where once you'd just steal your parents liquor and get drunk, now you do that and then go tagging.
"It is not so much a subcultural activity as it is another cultural activity of teenagers like pashing and poking is."
Oscar spoke to the Herald on the grounds of anonymity, and revealed he is a 29-year-old Auckland street artist who works full time in photography. Many graffiti artists like him hold down respectable jobs in advertising, fashion or the film industry, with some first-generation graffiti artists now in their 30s.
"The graffiti culture suffers from the young taggers as well because they go and ruin a lot of work that's done by the older more talented guys; work which should be given respect and left. But it gets tagged.
"It's like going to a gallery, getting a marker and drawing through a painting. It's just that in the graffiti culture it is not a painting in a gallery, it's on a wall outside.
The culture itself has a code and ethical framework. A really traditional one would be not to do schools and churches and for a lot of other people it would extend to not targeting residential fencing."
But Bill Searle, national manager of community policing, said their approach was to work with other groups to get graffiti removed. "We like people to get graffiti photographed and we try and identify who is responsible, not just for the tag names but for graffiti which is painted on without authority because there's still a view that it shouldn't be there anyway.
"Graffiti makes people and communities unsafe and it affects the value of people's homes. There's also a considerable cost to the community."
