The Museum of the City of New York has a
rich exhibit on “the golden age of New York graffiti” but one man
isn’t happy at all about the display. New York City Police
Department (NYPD) Commissioner William Bratton is downright furious
that pieces
lauded as comparable to “Ali Baba’s cave of secret art
treasures” is being shown to the public… to kids!
“I find it outrageous that one of the city’s museums is
currently celebrating graffiti and what a great impact it had on
the city,” he
vented to The Wall Street Journal about “City as
Canvas,” which explores the explosion of street art in ’70s and
’80s and features the work of
“seminal figures in an artistic movement that spawned a worldwide
phenomenon, altering music, fashion, and popular visual culture.”
Pish posh. Bratton fears the consequences of “having New York City
school kids at the impressionable age of 12 years old walking
through looking at this stuff and having it advertised as ‘Isn’t
this great?'”
Isn’t it, though? Art’s got a
subjective side to it, and what the commissioner sees as 150
pieces of visually-digestible criminal inspiration, The New
York Times
celebrates the practice that “flourished so
wonderfully” in
part because “the nearly bankrupt city government lacked
the resources to stop it” and the fact that this exhibit
memorializes the history of “street art, a symbol of the
disaffection felt among young men (and a few women) of color,
attempted to reclaim streets and communities from systemic
neglect.” Others embrace the fact
that “the show highlights the role of street art as a tool of
self-expression.”
The museum director politely responded
that promoting crime to kids is not the exhibit’s intent.
But it’s little surprise Bratton jumped to such a far-out
conclusion. His blood has long boiled
at the sight of street art, and earlier this year he pushed to
put ugly bandaids on the problem by having officers divert their
focus from other crimes and
diligently paint squares over tags.
Bratton is a
big believer in “broken window theory” law enforcement, the
notion that
snuffing out low-level
crimes in a society will prevent the rise of more serious ones.
Whether this actually
works is up for
debate as much as the artistic merit of graffiti. Bratton’s own
boys in blue have a
bad history of manufacturing petty crime while not dealing with
bigger ones, though, and Bratton himself has defended such policies
even in the face of
tragic, lethal abuses like last month’s
killing of Eric Garner, a father of six who was allegedly
selling untaxed cigarettes.
But let’s remember, what Bratton is throwing a fit about this
week wasn’t a crime, it was a museum exhibit. The commissioner
seems to have become a self-parody in worrying that in the skulls
of children are brains so malleable, so easily impressed upon, that
seeing something in an educational setting might transform youths
into criminals.
No one tell him that there’s another graffiti exhibit in an
old NYPD
precinct building.
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