Contemporary Graffiti

With heightened security in the 80's, subway graffiti slowly died out. In 1989, the last train with significant amounts of graffiti on it was taken off the lines, ending an era. Traveling on the subways in 2003, there is virtually no graffiti to be seen on the outside of trains, and only dim scratchings here and there on the insides. But graffiti lives on, on city walls and other more unlikely places. Recently, there has been a trend towards writing graffiti on freight trains. Nowadays, artists are "getting up" not just in their own city, but across the country, furthering the transmission and mixing of different graffiti styles from all over. Graffiti has also become a way to make money. Graffiti art has been featured in exclusive galleries and has exerted its influence on the world of graphic design. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to see graffiti-style or graffiti-inspired art on t-shirts, posters, and CD covers.

However subway graffiti is not completely dead. Through the windows, if you are at the walls near the tracks (that aren't underground), there's still plenty of graffiti to be seen. When the subway trains are underground, if you look through the windows in between stations, you can still see a lot of graffiti, some of it older probably, but some of it newer as well. Self expression can be stifled but never completely stopped.