Broadly speaking, I’ve noticed 2 “styles” of tag graffiti: Serif-y line signature-like tags and big bubble writing. This is broadly speaking, there are of course subtleties, but as an outsider, graffiti can look very similar and does feel like they mostly fall into these 2 groups, whether it’s in North America, Europe, etc. You don’t usually hear “that is European style tagging”, I just see bubbly text no matter the location, and they not noticeable different to an outsider the way, say, American food looks different than Chinese food.
Was tagging a thing everywhere and they happened to look similar? Did styles in different places converge? Was there a cult of bubble taggers and the leader told them to spread the gospel around the world? Am I wrong with a biased dataset (noting of course there can be lesser seen visual styles)? ELI5.
Flairing as “other” as this is sort of a sociology topic, probably.
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Trains and copy cats. Trains travel all over the country and each car will hit different cities, but most will end up in major cities more than anywhere else. So someone from say New York makes a cool tag on a boxcar, and said boxcar travels from New York to Georgia and someone there sees it and goes oh cool I can do that and puts it on a wall. The boxcar then gets used for a shipment from Georgia to LA and the same thing happens. Then the boxcar travels from LA to Portland and it happens again.
After this long game of telephone via art you end up with the same style in 4 major cities. And it disperses even further from there. This is how the style traveled for a long time. Then the internet became main stream, now people simply post a cool piece they see online and people from anywhere in the world copy it.
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