I noticed on my way to class today that someone has spray-painted an image of our school mascot——you know, a wolverine——with the slogan “Go Wolverines!” on the wall of the Student Union. Have any of you seen that yet? I guess they’re just expressing their enthusiasm for the football season. It’s not a very artistic effort, but it is a perfect example of the kind of modem art I want to talk about today: graffiti.

Of course, graffiti is not modern at all. The earliest known examples are around 2000 years old. When Mount Vesuvius buried the Roman city of Pompeii under lava during its eruption In 79 AD, it preserved all kinds of graffiti, or wall messages, ——magic spells, curses, declarations of love, political slogans, literary quotations, all sorts of messages—just like our modem graffiti. The Mayans scrawled sayings on their temples in Guatemala. The Vikings scratched their initials on New Grange Mound in Ireland. And the Vandals — no pun intended——carved runes on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. So defacing public property with graffiti has been a universally popular pastime since the world’s earliest history.

Actually, we could go a lot further back into prehistory for examples, to the famous cave paintings of Lascaux, for instance——but these probably don’t fit the definition, since a main characteristic of graffiti is that it’s drawn or written on someone else’s property without permission—and consequently with some haste! By definition, graffiti—the singular is “graffito” 一 is the name for lettering or images that are illegally scrawled, scratched, sprayed or painted in any way on property. Nowadays, there are four general sorts of graffitigang graffiti, socio-political graffiti, expressive or humorous graffiti, and public art.