I have never heard of Daniel Johnston! Thanks to the random chance that I happened upon Johnston's graffiti and to the comments in the post below, I will now go check out his music. Here is where the street and the computer intersect in a collective knowledge that is not possible otherwise.

Speaking of graffiti that perseveres, media report that apparently "historic graffiti" from the 1980s was discovered in a building in Manhattan. It includes early NY graffiti writers' work such writing by Basquiat.

here are some quotes from CBS NEWS:

"It's a great discovery," says Alberto Mugrabi, a major Basquiat and Andy Warhol collector. "It's the beginning of graffiti [as art]."

"Obviously, it's a critical piece of history, SoHo history," says Lisa Dennison, the former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum read more here.

Below is an image of the graffiti being restored. Why is it being restored? Because its worth a lot of money and because time has given value to it. Now its a piece of history rather than a piece of vandalism and art collectors and museum directors are pontificating about it. I am sure that this news gets graffiti removal vigilantes' safety goggles steamed up.

Either way, the graffiti remains in the realm of extremes, validated by pretentiousness of the art world or scorned by the puritanism of street cleansing. I'm still in favor for the city to be our playground, the way that Situationists envisioned it, where scribbling, decorating, building, preforming, playing has a respected place in the city.

Where the value of urban play is not primarily translated into money, status or historic preservation, but into informal social interaction, like the one that happened around the funny bulge eyed frog drawn by a musician named Daniel Johnston, photographed and posted by me and explained by a couple of blog visitors.