Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality

Rating:
Summary: An excellent insight into the culture of tags and piecing
Review: Crimes of Style is a journey into the burgeoning underground Denver Graffiti scene. Jeff Ferrel's participant observations of local taggers and writers gives a fascinating insight into a sometimes beautiful and sometimes offensive subculture of vandalism....or is it? The question of vandalism or art remains an underlying question throughout Ferrel's book. And the reader must decide for himself where the line between art and crime stands. Jeff Ferrel's work is divine inspiration to the fledgling sociologists like myself.

Rating:
Summary: Pathbreaking anarchist criminology!
Review: Ferrell offers a major contribution to sociology, criminology, and to youth studies. This brief book not only offers insight and analysis of graffiti artists, it explores the ways in which power is negotiated and challenged. In the graffiti artists' use of space and in their definitions of beauty and neighborhood, they uncover the way power and meanings are manufactured. Ferrell's work is a powerful, clear, and engaging book; one which shows stunning new ways of seeing and studying 'crime.'

Rating:
Summary: Pathbreaking anarchist criminology!
Review: Ferrell offers a major contribution to sociology, criminology, and to youth studies. This brief book not only offers insight and analysis of graffiti artists, it explores the ways in which power is negotiated and challenged. In the graffiti artists' use of space and in their definitions of beauty and neighborhood, they uncover the way power and meanings are manufactured. Ferrell's work is a powerful, clear, and engaging book; one which shows stunning new ways of seeing and studying 'crime.'

Rating:
Summary: Although flawed this text explains why pols hate graff
Review: The ethnography in this text is insufficient, and the writers in the local Denver scene seem like cartoon characters, especially when compared to New York writers. However, the last quarter of Ferrell's book on anarchist criminology is powerful and goes a long way to developing a theory how graffiti impinges on the power stucture it is being painted on. graffiti upsets the aesthetics of authority.

Rating:
Summary: Although flawed this text explains why pols hate graff
Review: The ethnography in this text is insufficient, and the writers in the local Denver scene seem like cartoon characters, especially when compared to New York writers. However, the last quarter of Ferrell's book on anarchist criminology is powerful and goes a long way to developing a theory how graffiti impinges on the power stucture it is being painted on. graffiti upsets the aesthetics of authority.