Smile/Unsmile – Photos by Greggory Moore

It probably didn’t qualify as a “public art installation,” and it was only days before the closing of the Arts Council’s call for submissions of smartphone photographs of such for an upcoming exhibit, but when I saw these two “smiles” scrawled upon a pair of power boxes (or whatever they are), I memorialized them for future use, not realizing that days later their effacement would provide a perfect platform for considering whether sometimes graffiti is an improvement.

From this side-by-side comparison, isn’t the answer obvious?

Don’t misunderstand me. Graffiti is often a blight. By far the most use residents make of the GO Long Beach smartphone application is to report graffiti, and the City tends to be quite responsive. And when graffiti is of the “tagging” variety and not art for art’s sake, the quicker and more thoroughly we are rid of it. The same is true of defacement of private property. Your home, your rules.

Public property falls into a different category, but only slightly, since often it is designed with an eye toward the aesthetic. Even if the choice is not pleasing to my eye, it’s not for me and my paint can to dictate an alternate.

But then we come to public property created without any genuine aesthetic considerations—such as these power boxes. Call them necessary urban blight. It’s not beautiful to have big, bulky metal boxes popping up out of nowhere, but in theory their function makes them necessary.

That doesn’t mean they must be bland or ugly—like these power boxes. They can be canvases, upon which artist can be allowed to work their transformative magic.

What’s that you say? Writing “smile” isn’t much in the way of art? I don’t know about that. Sure, it’s the height of simplicity, but the artist in question had the good sense to write it on each, effecting a sort of binocular balance. And even if it’s a stretch to call this art, the question is: Are we really better off without it? Leave aside that whomever unsmiled the boxes did a crappy job and left some pretty ugly smudges in the smiles’ wake. Even were the boxes’ green paint returned to pristine condition, would the spot be better off bland than with a nice little message? Should we frown upon a little facelift?

I certainly understand the potential problems of allowing even the ugliest, non-aesthetic piece of public property to become free-for-alls. Nonetheless, we should look for the greatest good. And sometimes even an unsanctioned smile is better than none at all.