Eastern Market has invited various artists to put up their graffiti on walls in the area, long a popular spot for some of Detroit's best wall art, but the authorized graffiti has attracted freelance taggers, and now some business owners are wondering where it will stop.
Vicki Thomas of WWJ-AM radio reports Dan McCarthy is among the growing number of business owners concerned about the graffiti problem in the market. McCarthy, who owns Cost Plus Wine Shop, said business owners get ticketed if they don’t remove the unauthorized graffiti in a timely manner.
“Luckily, we have a mural on the side of our building and I guess there’s some sort of tagger rule that you don’t do any tagging over someone else’s artwork,” he said. “But, I mean, the whole market is being tagged every other day. You take it down and two days later it’s back up.”
One group of artists, known as The Weird, from Germany and Austria, spent time this summer painting large murals in the market. Their work accompanies this article.
McCarthy noted the conflict between the two groups of taggers.
“If you’re going to have artists come in and they’re allowed to put murals on the walls than why aren’t the taggers allowed to? It’s mixed messages and different standards and you can’t have that."
