Column: Is that graffiti or art? How LA draws the lines

It's arguably graffiti, but not the kind that generates a gut-punch reaction among some Angelenos. For them, graffiti is a synonym for defacement and vandalism — and gangs marking out turf and messaging their enemies with menacing scribbles. Who wants to see those sinister scrawls creep into their neighborhoods?

Two incidents, both in the 1990s, caught the tone of Angelenos' sentiments. One was the 1991 arrest of "Chaka," who had written that name over and over, literally 10,000 times, on freeway bridges and signposts from Orange County to San Francisco. Then, 24 hours after he was let out of jail, he was caught in the downtown courthouse. He'd written CHAKA on an elevator door — on his way to see his probation officer. In 1996, after college scholarship and work offers, finding God and taking a job painting church buses for a Christian camp, he was arrested for tagging again.

A year later, a Woodland Hills teenager who'd been tagging above the San Diego Freeway fell 100 feet, fracturing his spine, both ankles and his left arm. Not everyone felt sorry for him. One Times letter writer summed up the sentiments of no small number of people: "I do not see the artistic expression involved in scrawling your street name across a piece of concrete like an animal marking its territory."

The best graffiti has something to teach, something to say, and that something is more than "my tagging crew is bad-assier than yours." On Julian Street in Skid Row is the phenomenal Skid Row mural, paid for and painted by locals.

It is poignant and pointed.

It's a mock-official, green and white sign, bearing the city seal, the words "SKID ROW CITY LIMIT" and at the bottom, "POP Too Many."

A man — a writer named Charles Bukowski — who used to work up the road from Skid Row, sorting mail at the Terminal Annex, once wrote something that suits that image quite aptly. "An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."