Growing up in India graffiti and art on the walls was something I grew up around and grew up detesting. I had many reservations against the idea of people “defacing” and destroying public property that was shared by everyone. In India I grew up in a upper middle class neighborhood where the ideal set was that public property had to be respected and nobody was allowed to express themselves on it. I never understood at that young age , that these were the spaces for us, the public to make with it what we could.
After coming to the United States I began growing an appreciation for the art that people called graffiti usually but was more, it was mural art. Art that expressed the voices of the populations that were supressed, who could not talk about their problems, or just had nobody to listen to them. The art movement in Los Angeles is rich and varied and has a long and detailed history, but had a brief stop when the Power that would be thought that it would blemish the “true beauty” of the city. There was a ban on mural art on walls and public spaces in Los Angeles for 10 years until 2013 when it was lifted. The government put this ban in the first place to curb the use of advertising for products under the guise of art, and when the ban was lifted the one thing that still remained was consumer greedy corporations. While in Los Angeles we passed by countless pieces of art which were beautiful and very intricate but sold not a message of the artists choosing but a side of the Big Consumer America chose for them. 
What struck me the most is that within a city so large and “glitzy” the contant and never ending greed of these corporations to take more from the body they are already sucking dry. The city of Los Angeles is filled with the latest in consumer commodities of various brands and makes and varying ridiculous price tags, and these are already making of the economy of this city a large and very lucrative industry. The stealing of the green and public spaces is to me the last straw, where they are taking something as pure as expression through art and polluting it with their greed and necessity for more wealth. The power of art inspite of these many obstacles, like capitalism and the system in place, is seen in the lower income neighborhoods where the populations of L.A that are “hidden away” reside. These are the populations of Los Angeles, that the government try to sideline and keep away from the true possibilities available to them. Skid Row has some of the most powerful and deep setting mural art and telling the stories of how far pushed away the homeless and the racial minorities have been pushed and shoved.
One particular mural stuck out to me more clearly, in Skid Row told me a story on my first day in L.A that I hadnt truly been able to grasp until much later. When walking into the neighbourhood known as Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, there is a mural on the wall which reads Skid Row , City Limit, Population: Too Many. And thats all it said, with so few words clearly painted the bleek and dowtrodden picture that was a reality to those that resided in this area. It painted the truth of how broken the entire system is, and how far capitalism has pushed us to forget how to care for our fellow man before ourselves. The epitome of greed that has been fostered has winners and losers, and these were the those “losers” , and they were so because the powers that would be deemed them unfit to be part of society. The power of art will prevail and send their message as long as there is an audience to know its importance, we must remember that our greed is not the be all and end all, there are priorities higher than that, causes larger and more importantly fellow humans more important.
