Graffiti culture comes with norms and sanctions just like any other culture on this earth. Graffiti culture values originality and style. Their norm is not to be recognized or to stay incognito. Another value that lives in the culture is the determination, because any time that their tag was buffed out they would go quickly and throw up another tag. Graffiti culture may seem like an ongoing cycle of trying to beat the buff but in reality there is much more to it.
Values in any culture are ideal customs that a community has appointed as significant. In the graffiti culture artist value originality, style and determination. If an artist has these three and they go hand in hand the artist become very well known because of the type of work that they are putting up and the amount of work they are putting out. Along with values come the norms of the culture, which to me seem very interrelated.
Graffiti culture has norms as well, a norm is a standard. A norm that the graffiti culture has is that they usually cover their face when they are in the act of doing graffiti. This has to do with the fact that if your face is covered people or the police will not recognize you if they see you on the street in broad daylight. This helps not to get arrested as easily as if you go out completely bare faced. Another standard is getting up at night. The reason graffiti artist get up at night is to remain unknown and out of the eye of the police. The last norm that I will talk about is that of their names. Graffiti artist never go and tag their real names, because if they did that would be too easy on the police.
Speaking about the police, they are the people who along with people in the community enforce the sanctions in the graffiti community. A formal and poplar sanction in the graffiti culture is getting arrested. That is why artist try and remain unnoticed because if they begin to get investigated by the authorities the possibility that they might get arrested soon becomes very high. A business owner who catches a graffiti artist tagging his business would do an informal sanction. This business owner might make the artist do community service and paint his whole store or the whole wall that the artist was working on, covering all of the previous graffiti. If artist are caught by any of the previous named it shows up as kind of a warning sign for other artist in the community. The artist that find out about the area that the previous artist was working on can warn other artist that usually work or intend on working in that area.
Symbolic Internationalism-
Symbolic interactionism is the communication by symbols. Graffiti is such a visual art that describing it through symbolic internationalism is the best rout to go. Some symbols associated with graffiti are the infamous bubble letters, throughout the history of the making of a brilliant graffiti artist the bubble letters have appeared in ore than enough sketches. Another symbol would have to be spray cans, any graffiti artist has done work with aerosol cans and anytime you see a person with a book bag full of cans you immediately think of a vandal, or graffiti artist. And lastly another symbol is the gas mask, the gas mask is a big symbol in this community because working to create these magnificent masterpieces the intoxicating fumes of spray paint are constantly inhaled and to be protected some artist prefer to use gas masks.