Graffiti as an art form

The first drawings on walls appeared in caves thousands of years ago. While the Ancient Romans were writing their names and protest poems on buildings, the Greeks were doing the exact same thing. Modern graffiti seems to have appeared in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, and by the late sixties it had reached New York. The new art form really took off in the 1970s, when people began writing their names, or ‘tags’, on buildings all over the city. In the mid seventies it was sometimes hard to see out of a subway car window, because the trains were completely covered in spray paintings known as ‘masterpieces’.In the early days, the ‘taggers’ were part of street gangs who were concerned with marking their territory. They worked in groups called ‘crews’, and called what they did ‘writing’ – the term ‘graffiti’ was first used by The New York Times and the novelist Norman Mailer. Art galleries in New York began buying graffiti in the early seventies. But at the same time that it began to be considered as an art form, John Lindsay, the then mayor of New York, declared the first war on graffiti. By the 1980s it became much harder to write on subway trains without being caught, and instead many of the more established graffiti artists began using roofs of buildings or canvases.The debate over whether graffiti is art or vandalism is still going on. Peter Vallone, a New York city councillor, thinks that graffiti done with permission can be art, but if it is on someone else’s property it becomes a crime. One day, one graffiti artist was writing his name on a wall, when Peter interrupted and toldhim: ‘I have a message for the graffiti you and the vandals out there,’‘Your freedom of expression ends where my property begins.’ On the other hand, Felix, a member of the Berlin-based group Reclaim Your City, says that artists are reclaiming cities for the public from advertisers, and that graffiti represents freedom and makes cities more vibrant. Why is the past simple tense used throughout the text? What about the past continuous? In what cases is it used? Why? Sort the following verbs depending if they are regular or irregular. Regular appeared worked declared Irregular wrote took off began was were became Think of an alternative title for the text, and think for subtitles for each paragraph. Title:Paragraph 1:Paragraph 2:Paragraph 3: