Art nouveau

Every once in a while, when the usual topics in the "Letters to the editor" section of the local scandal rag have bottomed out, when the Anti-Abortion folks have run dry and the No Hand Outs - Let 'em Freeze in the Dark people are out burning fossil fuels in their snow machines and four-wheelers, the Graffiti is Inspired by Satan and Created by Filthy Vandals people step in to fill the void, inspiring a flurry of comments on the reprehensible nature of graffiti and its practitioners. The consensus is, clearly, that graffiti is a deplorably ugly, morally repugnant defacement of public spaces; it flies in the face of decency and respectability, and who knows where the hands holding that spray paint have been. Hardly anybody jumps in to assert that sometimes graffiti might just actually be art.

Here in interior Northern Cold Place, the graffiti viewing hot spot (or large, tempting canvas, depending upon your point of view and the availability of cheap spray paint) is Moose Creek Bluff. This just delights me because Moose Creek Bluff, with it's broad face and giant canvases of bare rock, has been a tempting site for graffiti since, well, actually, prehistoric times. When you call graffiti "petroglyphs" it becomes fascinating! In fact, there was a big outcry when the bluff face, petroglyphs and all, was blasted back several hundred yards and the Richardson Highway was widened to four lanes. People were aghast that such timeless art was destroyed. (The same blast also blew a more contemporary petroglyph, "SAC Sucks," off the bluff, but no one missed it other than a few airman down the road at Eielson Air Force Base, for whom that particular annotation held a sad and poignant truth.)

So, anyway, I'm thinking of starting a campaign. Save the Pre-Petroglyphs! T-shirts coming soon.