Over the weekend in the American city of Paterson, New Jersey, held a large gathering of graffiti artists, which brought together writers from around the world. They painted the walls of their host school, and formally announced the creation of the Urban Arts (Urban Art Foundation), whose main goal is the decriminalization of their work. Artists will be collecting funds to cover the legal costs of his colleagues, working on a database of lawyers and fight for giving some well-known graffiti-points of the status attractions. It is expected that soon the fund will become a full-fledged nonprofit organization.

According to official sources, in 2009 in New York was committed 4,158 arrests of writers, while in 2006 this figure did not reach up to three thousand. As at 22 August, the number of arrests for the year is 2685. Since graffiti is fighting a special police unit that has a database of offenders and the book "worst of the worst", which gathered about a hundred names of the most active writers. At the mayor has task force to combat street art, which includes representatives of different departments.

Defenders graffiti argue that artists are punished too harshly. Even those who declare their activities illegal, believe that a prison term of such misconduct does not pull. Representatives of the graffiti world emphasize that the image of New York as the "cradle" of this subculture attracts a large number of artists and tourists from around the world. Every day on the website Flickr laid thousands of images of street paintings, which is a testament to the vital interest of people to this art form. For fans of graffiti even arranged tours.

Many writers, tired of constant confrontation with the guardians of order, begin to seek ways to engage their favorite thing legally. This applies to most members of the Fund's urban art. One of them, 38-year-old Raul Rubio (Raul Rubio), decided to abandon the graffiti once spent a couple of weeks in jail and released on probation. "Then I was a young boy, I wanted to know about me people to notice me" - he says. Now Rubio is a small company which mainly deals with the design of logos and album art. "We are able to present graffiti in a positive light, to give the city something good, to convince the authorities that this art should be protected - and now the graffiti on the streets just dies in the galleries as it is almost no one sees».

material prepared Yulia Maksimova, AI

Sources: online.wsj.com , artinvestment.ru