Street art has been around for eons. every cave painting is graffiti and most of whats carved on walls in Rome is vandalism. most of it much cruder than whats around today. Roman soldiers would carve "Spartacus was here" or "I have a bigger penis than Caesar". and as the roman army was the law no one every got punished for this sort a vandalism, it was excepted. a joke to all other Latin speaking people. no one cared who read it.
in the past 30-40 years, graffiti and vandalism has changed... allot
it went from mindless tagging to more complex tagging to through ups and then the elaborate pieces you can find today if you know the right places to look.
a pioneer of tagging was cornbread, while he was in juvenile hall he acquired a nick name (cornbread) so he started to write it everywhere. people in the prison then started to talk about it and he thought "if everyone is talking about it in here, then everyone will talk about it out there". so when he got out, he started to write it everywhere he went and sure enough he made the local paper.
other people started doing it everywhere, all across America. an early standard form was to put you name (either real or pseudonym)and then your street number or school number. this ment that if your tag was on a wall miles away from where the number said you lived, you would get far more respect than just tagging your own area alot.
people then started to make the taggs more and more elaberate. one person would say, "this tag is better than that because it has this" then another would say "so THIS is even better" and so the elaberation continues adding more and more detail and complexity to each tag with extensions on letters and drop shaddow or 3D effects. and still the styles are changing and evolving and all in all inproving.
but it's not all about typography...
