"Empowering" equality in vandalism

Photo: Sarah Burke

Like the SF Weekly, the SF Chronicle strives in vain to be cool to cater to the city's many young people who don't read newspapers (The Chronicle endorses Critical Mass).

The Chronicle's latest pathetic attempt is a lavishly-illustrated story about teaching girls how to create graffiti/tagging "art":

Raised in rural Ohio, [Nina]Wright remembers when she was 16 sneaking out in the middle of the night to spray-paint barns with simple stencils depicting a robot holding a flower in its hands, an early piece that set the tone for Girl Mobb’s colorful and cartoonish style. Wright eventually moved to the Bay Area to attend the Academy of Art University, but quickly found it boring. To her, the streets seemed like a more immediate and playful canvas than the conventional art world could offer.

Of course the story provides a lame disclaimer:

That’s not to say Wright’s camp advocates vandalism. She does not encourage her students to partake in illegal graffiti, and all her classes are taught in spaces where they have permission to spray-paint (Graffiti Camp for Girls teaches how to break into boys’ club of street art).

Right. Like the guys, the girls will never use their new skills to indulge in vandalism, which the city now spends $20 million a year to mitigate.