My girlfriend and I were in Barcelona last week, and I fell in love. I’ve been a lot of places, but I’ve never been in a place that made me feel like Barcelona. It’s a city that just, to me at least, oozes creativity. I’m not just talking about the famous Catalonian artists, architects, etc. but even the graffiti artists blew me away. Every city wall was covered with the most intricate and distinct tags I’ve ever seen.
I come from a fairly small town in the US, and we don’t have much graffiti. Yet, I see graffiti all over Europe, though it’s mostly just someone’s handle, some quotation, or a random cuss word.
I’d like to know if there is some special graffiti culture in Barcelona. Also, the reason I ask if the city itself commissions the works is because the works themselves seem like they would take quite some time to complete and they’re all over the city (not just back alleys), so it seems to me that there would have to be some sort of support or at least tacit acceptance of the people doing these murals.
Also, if anyone knows of other cities like this with cool graffiti, I’d be interested…