All Work and No Spray...

 I went down to Nelson street - which sounds like a line from a bad detective novel, but isn't - to check out the "street art," yesterday.
 I put "street art" in inverted commas because apparently, the shadowy cabal of arseholes who have already ruined most of the language have now taken umbridge with the word "graffiti."
 As the great George Carlin once pointed out, emotionally damaged soldiers went from suffering "Shell Shock", a brutal, descriptive term, to "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder," a soft-sounding technical term that added six syllables and a hyphen to a phrase that was already working just fine.
 The same people are all over the landscape of racial language, as well, making sure that nobody is "black" when they could be more awkwardly described as "afro-caribbean."
 It's depressing, but this sort of committee thinking is, sadly, bleeding it's way into "street art" as well.
 (Seriously, who was offended by the word "graffiti" ?! Aside from tedious busybodies who are offended by anything that doesn't involve dicking about with terminology every fifteen seconds, I can't possibly see anyone who could object to a word that comes from the Italian phrase "to scratch.")
 The graffiti in Nelson street used to be great; about a year ago, they took a dreary city block and covered it with paintings and murals that were by turns intelligent, satirical, funny, anarchic and steeped in gallows humour.
 This year, they decided to do it all again, and have ended up with some pretty squiggles.
 I was really let down by the new stuff, although I don't know why I didn't see it coming. Last year it felt spontaneous and edgy. This year there was a fanfare and a launch party and a facebook campaign like it was all in aid of a new flavour of Coke.
 Graffiti shouldn't really be organised, or sectioned off, or planned by anyone except the artist. It should feel random and chaotic and - in the best cases - like it has a statement to make.
 Last year's graffiti tackled subjects like the financial crisis and the London riots. This year's street art is mostly just random images, however well painted, that say nothing except "here is a well-painted random image."
 I left Nelson street feeling disappointed, and on my way home, I jumped a fence and climbed down under a bridge where I knew there was some old-fashioned, illegal spray painting.
 It was ten times better. It was a sprawling, chaotic, senseless car-crash of images and ideas and colours and slogans, surrounded by dingy concrete and litter and soundtracked by the cars passing overhead and the leaking of a cracked water pipe.
 It didn't make any deep political statements like some of the best graffiti can, but at least it felt organic and alive and malleable.
 This is the problem; as soon as you fence graffiti in and organise it, it becomes dull and neutered. The same people that are attempting to cripple the way we speak are apparently being let loose on what used to be a legally dubious outlaw pastime.
 Turns out, the biggest threat to graffiti artists these days isn't being arrested; it's having their balls cut off and being smothered with kindness by the kind of people who think that if we don't call a spade a spade, nobody will notice that we're being buried.
 I still like Nelson street better with some colour in it, but if all we're celebrating is random splashes of colour in urban areas, wouldn't it have been easier to stick a flower bed in the area and have done with it?