Street art vs graffiti: what the words mean and why cities care

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On the corner below my flat in Athens there is a wall that holds the whole argument. At knee height there is a black signature sprayed in one movement; above it, a stencilled face half washed away by rain; higher still, painted from a lift with the owner's blessing, a pair of enormous blue hands. The woman who runs the kiosk opposite calls all three "the graffiti". A writer from the neighbourhood would tell you that only the first one is graffiti, and he would not mean that as a compliment to the other two.

The words matter more than they seem to. Councils budget to remove one and to commission another, courts treat them differently, and the people who make the work care about the labels more than anyone. Here is what each term usually means, where they blur, and why a city ends up taking sides.

Graffiti: a word for writing

The word is Italian, from graffiare, to scratch, and archaeologists still use it for marks cut into ancient walls. The names, jokes, insults and election slogans scratched into the plaster of Pompeii are the classic examples. For most of its life the word meant any unofficial writing on a wall.

The modern sense comes from the United States. In Philadelphia in the late 1960s and in New York in the early 1970s, teenagers began writing their names, or names they had invented, across their cities as often and as visibly as they could. A 1971 New York Times article about a writer who signed himself TAKI 183 helped turn a local habit into a citywide competition. Within a few years the signatures had grown into large, coloured letters painted along the sides of subway cars, and the trains carried them from one borough to the next.

That culture built its own vocabulary, and it is still the clearest guide to what graffiti means to the people who do it. A writer is the person. A tag is the quick signature, a throw-up is a fast outline of letters filled with one colour, and a piece (short for masterpiece) is a full lettered work with colour, depth and style. A crew is the group a writer paints with. The subject is almost always letters, and the first audience is other writers, who can read styles that look like noise to everyone else.

Two documents carried that train culture across the Atlantic. One was the film Style Wars, released in 1983. The other was Subway Art, the 1984 book of photographs by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, which young writers in European cities studied page by page. By the end of the 1980s New York had taken its painted trains out of service, but by then the letters had left on other routes.

Street art: pictures for passers-by

Street art is a younger and looser term. It describes unofficial work in public space that is mostly about images rather than names, made for the person walking past rather than for other writers. In Paris in the early 1980s, Blek le Rat began spraying stencilled rats and figures on walls. Later came paste-ups (posters glued up with wheat paste), stickers, small sculptures fixed to street furniture, and the tiled mosaic creatures that Invader has been attaching to Paris buildings since the late 1990s. Through the 1990s and 2000s Banksy, who came out of Bristol, turned the stencil into something close to a brand.

The practical differences follow from the audience. Street art can usually be read in a second by someone who has never held a spray can: a face, a joke, a figure in an unexpected place. It favours tools that let the artist prepare at home and work fast outside, such as a cut stencil or a printed poster. It is also more likely to be tolerated, even welcomed, by the owner of the wall, which is exactly why some graffiti writers distrust it.

Murals: the permitted version

A mural is easier to pin down: a painting made on a wall with permission, usually commissioned, and often planned to last for years. The tradition is far older than the spray can. The Mexican muralists of the 1920s, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros among them, painted public buildings for a government that wanted art the whole country could read. Socialist cities across Central and Southeast Europe later put mosaics and murals on schools, factories and housing blocks.

What changed from the 2000s onwards is the cast. Many of the artists now painting ten-storey walls at festivals started out as graffiti writers or street artists, and they bring letters, characters and techniques from the street to work done on a lift with a contract. A large wall needs an owner's consent, often a permit, surface preparation, access equipment and a plan for upkeep; the stages are set out in how a large mural gets made.

Side by side

Where the lines blur

In practice the three categories leak into one another. A lettered piece on a legal wall is graffiti by style and lawful by status. Vienna has run a programme of designated legal walls, the Wienerwand, since 2005, including long stretches beside the Donaukanal, where writers paint in daylight beside the cycle path. Under Waterloo station in London, the Leake Street tunnel has been an accepted painting space since a street art event held there in 2008. And in Athens a writer's name painted with real skill on a blank side wall can survive for years because the owner likes it, while a commissioned mural round the corner collects tags within a week.

Institutions blur things from the other side. In 2008 Tate Modern hung huge works by street artists on its river facade, and in 2011 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles staged a large survey called Art in the Streets.

The clearest sign that the law had noticed came from New York. At 5Pointz, a former factory complex in Long Island City, Queens, the owner let artists paint the buildings for years and the walls became famous. When he had them whitewashed in 2013 ahead of redevelopment, a group of the artists sued. In 2018 a federal court found that the destruction broke the Visual Artists Rights Act and awarded damages, and an appeals court upheld the decision in 2020. Work that grew out of graffiti culture was treated, in that case, as art of recognised stature.

Why cities care about the labels

For a city, vocabulary turns into money and policy. A typical council has one budget line for removing graffiti and, often in a different department, another for public art, festivals or street art tours. The same wall can be scrubbed by one office and promoted by another.

The removal side has a long intellectual history. The "broken windows" argument, set out by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in The Atlantic in 1982, held that visible disorder such as unrepaired windows and graffiti invites more serious crime. It shaped New York's campaign against painted trains and, later, its policing. Researchers have argued about the evidence ever since, but many cities still act on its instinct: clean quickly and the writers move on.

The promotion side has its own problems. Murals bring visitors, and they also bring estate agents. In Kerameikos and Metaxourgeio, painted walls became a selling point for flats once the area grew fashionable, a story I followed in Athens walls: street art, empty buildings and who the paint is for.

Heritage protection adds another layer. Berlin's East Side Gallery, the longest surviving stretch of the Wall, painted by artists from many countries in 1990, is a protected monument, so its paintings have been restored rather than left to fade. You can fit it into a day with the Berlin street art walk.

None of this reaches the pensioner who repaints her shop shutter every spring. She sees a cost, whatever the art historians call the thing she is painting over.

Reading a wall before you name it

Psyrri and Kerameikos are good places to practise, and the Athens street art walk links their walls into one route. Five questions help.

• Look for letters first. If the work is built around a name, even one you cannot read, you are looking at graffiti writing.
• Check the height. Work above the second floor usually needed a lift or scaffolding, which usually means somebody gave permission.
• Find the credit. Commissioned murals often carry a small signature, a date and sometimes a funder's mark in a lower corner.
• Notice what sits on top. A tag over a mural, or a paste-up over a tag, tells you how the street rates each layer.
• Ask who it addresses. A joke you get in a second was made for you; a style you cannot decipher was made for someone else.

Short answers

Is street art legal?

Only when the owner of the surface has agreed, and sometimes only with a city permit as well. A beautiful stencil painted without permission is, in most countries, the same offence as a tag, though quality often changes how quickly anyone bothers to remove it.

Is graffiti always vandalism?

Painting someone else's property without consent usually is, legally. But graffiti also names a style and a culture that now turns up on legal walls, in commissions, on canvas and in museums. The word covers both the act and the art form, which is why the argument never quite ends.

Why do some writers dislike the term street art?

Many see it as the gentler, more saleable branch of a culture that began with names on trains, one that borrowed graffiti's locations while dropping its letters and codes. Others move happily between both worlds, and plenty of muralists still paint letters when nobody is paying them.

Next time you stop in front of a crowded wall, read it from the bottom up: the tag at knee height, then the stencil at eye level, then whatever needed a lift. For each layer, ask who it was painted for. The answer will tell you more than any label.