Art. What do you think about when you hear the word? Maybe you think about famous artists from the past like Picasso or Michelangelo. Perhaps when you think about art you remember art classes in school when you were younger or doing crafts at home. But do you ever wonder about the meaning behind the art? Have you ever wondered about the motivation behind the artist?
Most people think that art is something that has to be prim and polished. As a society, we accept pottery, paintings, sketches, and other mainstream mediums as art, but what about things like graffiti? We as a society see graffiti and we think of violence and gangs. Why? Is graffiti not a form of art expression too? Is there not just as much passion behind the graffiti that cities work hard to cover up as there is in mainstream art? And might it just be possible that there is more emotion, more passion in these works of art? Roberto Lugo seems to think so.
Art is expression. It isn’t constrained to the mainstream media, that’s what is so great about it. But we’ve stereotyped certain types of art as “unacceptable”. If someone saw Roberto Lugo on the street, they would never guess that he was a professor at Penn State. We see people who “vandalize” things via graffiti as criminal and as Lugo pointed out, he fits into that stereotype perfectly.
When you don’t know the heart and passion behind the “vandalism”, you accept it as bad. When you understand how important that form of free expression is to people like Lugo, who maybe can’t afford a canvas or don’t know how to express themselves with a paint brush, it seems pretty hypocritical to cover up their works of art while praising others for their socially acceptable pieces.