Toilet Graffiti

Abstract

Writing is one of humanity’s greatest inventions, so great that it cannot always be confined to paper and computer screens. People have been writing in public spaces and on other people’s property for millennia. The inscriptions they leave are now widely known as graffiti, or literally ‘little scratchings’. As a genre of writing, graffiti have been controversial, valued by some as a form of artistic expression and criticized by others as mere vandalism. They have been hung from the satin walls of fashionable galleries and scrubbed from the sides of urban buildings by rehabilitated practitioners.