Art Attacks
By Tom Robotham
Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2006


Back in the 1970s, New York City was awash in graffiti. A lot of it, to my eye, was ugly, indecipherable scribbling. But a fair amount was far more than that. I remember one subway train in particular that had been transformed into a rolling mural of Santa and his reindeer.

It was delight at first sight. But, of course, it didn’t last. The authorities in city government and the New York City Transit Authority soon declared war on graffiti artists and attacked indiscriminately. And in time, every last trace of this street art disappeared.

(Well, from affluent neighborhoods, at any rate. This summer, while traveling by subway to the U.S. Open in Queens, I noticed that a lot of distressed neighborhoods are still covered with it.)

Whenever I reflect on this response to graffiti artists, I can’t help contrasting it with the city’s handling of The Charging Bull. Perhaps you’ve seen it – the huge bronze statue that now sits at Bowling Green in lower Manhattan. In December 1989, artist Arturo DiModica slipped through the shadows of the financial district in the dead of night and placed his sculpture in front of the New York Stock Exchange.

The next morning, commuters young and old alike stumbled upon the bull with the same surprise and delight that the Santa mural had elicited. And initially, the response of the authorities was similar as well. (Can’t have spontaneous moments of delight, now can we? That might lead to all sorts of spontaneous behavior. And then what?)

Police seized the sculpture and brought it to an impound lot.

After many people clamored in protest, however, the city relented. The statue was restored to the neighborhood, a few blocks from where it was first dropped, and it sits there to this day.

The difference here is not in the protest, per se. People objected to the removal of the Santa mural, too. The difference lies in who the protestors were and in the nature of the respective art works.

In the end, the bull prevailed in part because its core supporters were well-heeled Wall Street workers and in part because of what it was – a symbol of money and power. It was guerrilla art, to be sure, but it was also, in essence, a celebration of establishment values.

The subway art, by contrast – while depicting an icon of mainstream culture – was part of a protest movement. It was created by one member of an army of kids and more mature artists who had emerged from a bleak, monochromatic and seemingly hopeless urban landscape and had announced that they would not succumb but would instead infuse their world with color.

And therein lies the rub. New Yorkers and tourists from all walks of life had gotten a kick out of the Santa mural. But the only people who fiercely objected to the removal of such paintings were those who understood the context. And let’s face it: those people just didn’t have much political influence.


I bring all this up in the context of this week’s cover story because it has a lot of relevance, I think, to the current state of culture in the Seven Cities.

In Norfolk and Virginia Beach alike, there seems to be a zero-tolerance policy toward cultural spontaneity – or even faux spontaneity – of any kind.

A case in point: Recently a friend told me of an incident in which two downtown "ambassadors" were harassing a skateboarder – a college student who was apparently using his board as simple transportation.

City officials and some business leaders argue that such harassment is necessary because skateboarders are creating problems downtown.

I guess the definition of a problem is in the eye of the beholder. I work in the heart of downtown and see skateboarders here and there as I walk around – something I do a lot – but they’ve never once struck me as a problem.

It is, of course, entirely possible that skateboard-inflicted property damage has escaped my notice. But that’s a separate issue.

Police and ambassadors should be on the look out for dangerous or potentially damaging behavior of any kind. But that is a far different approach from zero tolerance. The former would encourage spontaneity, creativity and urban vitality while ensuring the safety and security of pedestrians, motorists and property owners. The latter approach simply saps the very life out of the city.


All well and good, you might say. But what does skateboarding have to do with public art?

Well, it’s all of a piece. Great public art emerges as an organic response to a cityscape (or in the case of the artist on our cover, a swampscape) and it becomes part of that world. But in the absence of surrounding vitality, it amounts to little more than an oasis at best or an empty shell at worst.

In order for individual works of public art to take on meaning, the city as a whole needs to feel like a work of art – a collective and sustained buzz of creative energy: of people finding their own modes of transportation to get around our society’s mindless dependence on automobiles; of street musicians – the superb and the awful alike – singing their songs, playing their tunes and hoping for a few dollars in contributions in exchange for bringing wisps of joy into someone’s world; banners flying from the windows and walls of commercial buildings, announcing all manner of things; block parties that shut down streets in celebration of….whatever. (The end of Republican control of Congress? See you out there!).

Instead of actively encouraging this sort of spontaneity, many officials in both Norfolk and Virginia Beach seem to live in terror of it. They want all the economic benefits of a lively city but none of the risks. The net result is a cityscape that is pleasant but has all the energy and color of a gated retirement community.

(I should note that Ghent is the exception – although even Colley Avenue could benefit from the stimulant of guerrilla art attacks from time to time.)

The only solution to this problem that I know of is a grassroots effort. An influx of street musicians and sidewalk artists (using chalk – the murals don’t have to be permanent) would be a great start.

I don’t know what the city codes are with regard to the latter, but there are no obstacles to the former that I know of. Indeed, several years ago when I asked Mayor Fraim about possible legal barriers to sidewalk musicians, he told me he knew of none and that if there were any he’d probably want to do away with them.

But that, as I say, was several years ago. I can count on one hand the number of sidewalk musicians I’ve seen since then. This may be due to lack of initiative on the part of musicians themselves, but the city’s general message of zero-tolerance and iron-grip control (outdoor activities in Norfolk, by and large, must be run by Festevents) tends to snuff out any sparks from individual citizens.

As noted at the outset, this phenomenon is not peculiar to the Seven Cities. Indeed, if New York City were not so large and unwieldy, Mayor Giuliani would undoubtedly have done the same thing. (His post-9/11 elevation to the status of sainthood notwithstanding, he was, by and large, a tyrant.)

But New York is New York. The Greater Norfolk area is still very much in growth and revival mode. If officials hereabouts don’t loosen up, the revival will flat-line.