What Was the Point of the 5Pointz Millions?

“It’s not about the money,” said 5Pointz artist William Tramontozzi, Jr. one of the 21 “aerosol artists” whose work Wolkoff, whited out years before. It’s about declaring the dignity of an art form still technically rooted in trespassing. “It’s fantastic to get that validation that what we do is artwork, because we know it is. But, you know, in some ways it’s got a bad rap over the years,” Tramontozzi told me. “We just wanted to show that it’s something someone can’t just go and destroy—it was actually over 70 pieces that he destroyed.” The damages Judge Block decided to grant covered just 45 of them, the damages totaling $150,000 per artwork.

“We didn’t want to just bow down and let that happen,” Tramontozzi explained. Not when their art form already “always takes a backseat to stuff that you typically see in a museum, like oil paintings and sculptures.” To accept defeat would be to tacitly agree with an assessment that, as Tramontozzi said, “what we do isn’t as important.” Instead, Block’s decision seems to say just the opposite.

What does it mean, though, for a medium that’s long derived its coolness from an air of criminality to be awarded legal protection at the expense of New York’s last ruling commodity: real estate? “Aerosol art”—what we used to call graffiti—traces its cultural roots to the stuff Rudy Giuliani scrubbed from the sides of subway cars. It was cool because it was a crime. Whereas now, it’s a commercial strategy. “There’s actually been a lot of companies and businesses that reached out to us, that are on our side during the case, that are offering us space,” Tramontozzi told me, “which is really kind of cool.” Owners who are more hip to the scene see the value in “aerosol artists” adding that edge of underground vogue to a bland building.

But doesn’t the profit-conscious carefulness that comes with a commercialist embrace risk making the art itself, well, bland? Intellectual property lawyer and Columbia law professor Philippa Loengard wouldn’t weigh on the lost spontaneity of corporate-sponsored street art. But she did say the decision would direct landlords toward extra-cautious dealings with these artists. “You would need to get them to sign away [their VARA rights], and that’s a shame,” she said. Plus, “If I am a building owner, I’m going to be more hesitant in general to have an artist come to my building.”

And then, how does the decision apply to art unapproved by the landlord? Wolkoff had an informal, unwritten agreement the artists on his property, one he clearly did not consider binding. “I am a little concerned,” she added, “about what the ramifications of this decision are for landlords, building owners who find graffiti or ‘aerosol art’ on their on their property. What do they do then?” Conceivably, an uncultured owner could paint over it—it’s happened before—and then find himself liable for damages.

Eric Bjorgum, who won more than a million in damages for muralist Kent Twitchell after his famed downtown Los Angeles portrait of artist Ed Ruscha was accidentally whitewashed, says New York might look west for a model of how to handle these property concerns. He recalled 5Pointz artist Lady Pink, back when it looked like they’d lose to Wolkoff, asking him what Los Angeles does differently. How have they managed to protect open-air aerosol art in LA? In short, they regulate.

Graffiti, what street art or aerosol art used to be called, is Italian for “scratched.” Think of names and dates chiseled into stone walls. (You can see “Leonardo 1820” etched into Temple of Dendur, which was moved from beside the Nile to Sackler wing of the Met in the 1970s.) Or consider messages sharpied onto a bathroom stall, to say nothing more profound than I was here! or Call Spudsy for a good time. It’s a cheeky wave hello from the casual graffitisti—transmitted across time and against the rule that says we shouldn’t draw on other people’s stuff. It’s always been a means of leaving one’s mark on a canvas, public or private, but not expressly one’s own.

Over the last century or so, this medium rooted in the thrilling irreverence of mild to extreme vandalism has made its slow crossing over into the rarefied realm of Serious Art. Its greatest leaps took place at times of class struggle and cultural upheaval. Recall the radical Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, whose allegorical frescos directly inspired the New Deal’s Federal Art Project—a melding of popular witness and expert craftsmanship that brought fine art to the depressed masses. And the popularity of 5Pointz, which Wolkoff first opened to street artists in the late nineties, skyrocketed during the depths of the Great Recession. It was then that the transient en plein air gallery first publicly grappled with its landlord’s desire to build condos: A 2011 New York Times feature details the doomed campaign to save 5Pointz, and quotes a determined Wolkoff: “The building is old, it doesn’t warrant repairs, and no matter what, it has to come down.”

By 2013, this owner who’d hosted the world-famous monthly rotation of “aerosol art” was sick and tired of his tenants’ whining. When he whitewashed their already intentionally impermanent paintings one night, the art world collapsed into a bitter mourning. Even the reclusive street artist Banksy, whose renown is great enough to have made fine-art graffiti an unavoidably mainstream concept, weighed in at the end of his New York tour: “Save 5pointz. Bye.”

Except now that it’s legally protected under VARA, and quite expensively protected per the new 5Pointz precedent, one has to wonder: Is street art still cool? By the standards of a truly underground scene, it never really was, Tramontozzi countered. “5Pointz was a tourist attraction,” he reminded me. “It wasn’t really the underground scene, or hidden.” Uncool people knew about it, everyone who rode the No. 7 saw it. Now, everyone knows how many millions the law decided it was worth. He added, for the sake of context I didn’t know, “it might seem uncool to some of the street graffiti writer guys.” But, he reminded me, the artists weren’t suing for a payout: “People see that $6.7 million, that’s what stands out to everyone. But the judge came up with the money amount. We didn’t ask for that.”