Graffiti on Dumpsters: Rubbish Art or Just Another Tag? 
By: Virginia Watson

The whole idea of graffiti has a number of implications on public aesthetics, but when it comes to graffiti on dumpsters, does an artist’s motive strain away from beautification and more toward marking their territory? I suggest that most graffiti that we see on dumpsters is a form of tagging, and is not in any way an effort to beautify an object that lacks a certain aesthetic appeal.

Walking by a dumpster or a trash can is something we do many times a day, with rarely, if ever, a second glance. Connell Vaughan suggests that graffiti can be read as the ‘aestheticising of rubbish’, or may even be implicated as a critique to the distinctions between art and rubbish (2011:284). He associates a connection between the two in the outside world of graffiti, which therefore proposes that the two may have more similarities than they do differences. In the case of graffiti on dumpsters, I agree with Vaughan’s connections. Dumpsters all over Vancouver are studded with tags from various artists or certain groups, with very few drawings or pictures on the grander scale.

Graffiti in the form of tagging should not be justified as art, and viewed from a rather critical perspective. Dumpsters with graffiti are a common occurrence that show how tagging in illicit spaces can be equated in society with the level of rubbish.

Vaughan, Connell
     2011 Institutional Change, the Concept of the Avant-Garde and the Example of
              Graffiti. Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics. 3:281-293.