Present TenseThe eternal quest to establish Dublin as a modern capital to compare with all those other stylish capitals we can now fly to so cheaply continues apace, with Antony Gormley's towering Wicker Man sculpture in the River Liffey the latest chapter. But there's an innate scruffiness to Dublin that no amount of revamping, regenerating and reimagining can remove. The city always looks a little rough, like an awkward 17-year-old wearing a suit for the first time.
Dublin City Council has a simple plan to sharpen up the dirty old town, and it consists of charging city businesses €20 million over five years to pay for comprehensive cleaning. The measures would include power-hosing the streets every day, emptying litter bins more often, lifting chewing gum from pavements, and quickly removing graffiti from buildings. This is unequivocally a good thing. Here's the but: tackling graffiti, in particular, is like banning dust or outlawing erosion. Like it or loathe it, graffiti is part of the human condition.
Who doesn't know that Pompeii was riddled with graffiti? Scrawling barely legible characters, whether with Roman writing tools or malodorous markers, is a by-product of civilisation. Waging war on graffiti taggers is worthy of Sisyphus, except that the poor cleaner's name won't become synonymous with futile tasks.
But while we won't ever eradicate it, we do need to admit that the graffiti that graces our ugly shop shutters and grimy brick walls isn't just vandalism, it's third-rate vandalism - and this city deserves better. What's setting Dublin apart from those other stylish capitals isn't the existence of graffiti here, it's the sheer mediocrity of the graffiti here.
This admittedly controversial assertion hinges on a theory that is underpinned only by superficial observation and anecdotal evidence, but is probably ripe material for a thesis or two. I like to call it the Graffiti Creativity Index (or GCI, if any taggers out there want to adopt it as their nom de vandalisme). This is the notion that there is a direct correlation between the level of a city's cultural and creative activity and the quality, and quantity, of its graffiti. As evidence, look at Toronto, Buenos Aires or, closer to home, Berlin. All three are home to a wide variety of highly imaginative and accomplished graffiti, from old-school spray-painted tags to elaborate stencil graffiti and inventive stickers, and all three are hives of artistic, musical and creative activity. QED.
In Dublin, on the other hand, not-for-profit creativity seems to be the preserve of art students and aspiring musicians - our vaunted sense of artistic expressiveness isn't as palpable as we like to think. And, as the GCI predicts, our graffiti, with the exception of some interesting stickering, is largely made up of derivative tags saying Grift or ICN (which stands for InCogNito, apparently, but then, who wouldn't want to remain anonymous with output that mundane?).
Power-hosing is too good for them - the culprits should be sent to NCAD and taught about typography and composition. London's infamous stencil artist Banksy once said, "All artists are prepared to suffer for their work, but why are so few prepared to learn to draw?" If only our spray-can-wielding taggers learned how to write. Of course, comparing scrawled doodles on shutter doors to the inspired work of Banksy is like comparing those late-night ITV phone quiz shows to The Sopranos. They may use the same medium, but they're as far apart on the art spectrum as is possible to imagine.
There is a lesson for Dublin's wannabe street artists in the inspired graffiti I was fortunate enough to see in Toronto a few years back. I was living in a defiantly alternative neighbourhood, proudly free of Starbucks and supermarkets, and chock-full of beautiful street art, proving that one person's graffiti is another person's mural. The house I stayed in had a gigantic gable end with a mishmash of competing cartoons and slogans, but the owner was forced to paint the entire thing a deep maroon. Given the neighbourhood, it was as if a colossal canvas had been dropped into the middle of Renaissance Florence - its nakedness invited, nay demanded, defacement.
What epic image would find a home on the newly Dulux-ed bricks? We waited a day, then two, and still nothing. And then, on the third night, it came. You needed to soak it in from the other side of the street to do it justice, so subtle was its power, so elegant its execution. For there, at head height on the once uniformly maroon gable, a single brick had been lovingly painted a light blue. From a distance, surrounded by the maroon expanse, it was the most entrancing brick in west Toronto. But on closer examination, the brick revealed yet another facet to its artistic triumph. In the top-left corner of the brick, the artist, or vandal if you insist, had written in small, neat handwriting the words "The One-Brick Manifesto". Graffiti had found its minimalist maestro, its very own Philip Glass, and his definitive, breakthrough work was on the side of my house - I felt privileged. The lesson for our stylish capital's street artists is this: adopt the imaginative spirit of the One-Brick Manifesto, or face the full fury of the power-hose and the paintbrush.
Shane Hegarty is on leave