Kurt Iveson... A man with a brain....

C&P from the SMH site...

LET'S LEARN TO LIVE WITH (GOOD) GRAFFITI
Kurt Iveson
SMH WEBSITE
February 5, 2009

A teenager was sentenced this week to three months in prison for tagging a cafe in Hyde Park with a felt pen, marking a new low in the long and futile war on graffiti.

Many people find tagging ugly and annoying, and it can be costly to remove. But is it appropriate to imprison someone for three months (at a cost of more than $20,000 to the taxpayer) for writing one non-offensive word on a wall (at a removal cost of $200 to the property owner)?

Graffiti has always been with us. But new forms of graffiti associated with hip-hop culture - including tags and murals (or "pieces") - began appearing in Sydney in the 1980s. Since then, governments of all persuasions have waged a war on graffiti. They have established specialist police squads. They have deployed rapid removal teams to paint the town brown. They have erected countless kilometres of barbed wire and thousands of surveillance cameras. They have legislated harsher penalties for graffiti offenders. They have sought to make spray-paint less accessible. They have even censored graffiti magazines and computer games. The objective? Zero tolerance.

Kurt Iveson teaches urban geography at the University of Sydney.

Rest of the article HERE.