Prologue

ON GRAFFITI, SPIRIT OF THE CITY AND OLD SCHOOL
You Have Newspaper, We have Walls

”For the entire world you are only someone, and for me you are the entire world.”
We have read this graffiti recently on Čukarička padina, on an unseemly concrete wall, while waiting for the traffic light to turn green. It is written in beautiful, large Cyrillic letters, most likely so that it can be read from the window, which is, for the author, the most important in the world. Every morning those eyes would open, and the blinds open up before them, revealing the view on the world, and then they see a message intended only for them. And the world is no longer the same and the day gets a new tone and meaning.
Oh, so much wit, charm, sensitivity, fine boldness and sharp intelligence is scattered over our cities in the past decades! Entire wall literature! Previously published anthologies of Serbian graffiti, mostly from Belgrade, only partially reflect this abundance.
”You have newspapers, we have walls!” was a message on a wall in Novi Beograd, across the street from Hotel ”Yugoslavia”. And in the second half of the 1980’s, in the delirium of communism, graffiti would intercept us on the Flower Square: ”Is there a life before death?” In the spring of 1999, while American humanitarian bombs were falling over Serbia, the famous BG message to the guy who had discovered America was created: ”Damn, Columbus, you also have to be a busybody in everything?!” A fragment of a verse written by Duško Radović, turned into graffiti long time ago, is a unique vaccination of Serbs against all dictators, the old and the new ones, local and from around the world: ”... Until Griša one day erased it with an eraser.” An aphorism by V. J. Jov was written on the wall of a dilapidated house in Dorćol until it was finally demolished: ”in is not that rock, they told the Sisyphus at the top.” And a Baljak’s aphorism, nearby: ”They should not be given food. They eat it all.” And a sentence by Momo Kapor on a Čubura wall: ”Psychoanalysis is a disease that spreads through treatment.”
However, the most irresistible are romantic graffiti. Below a window on the first floor, on a dark grey wall, in red letters: ”A proof that angels do not live only in heavens lives in this room.” For example.
With sadness we watch this important legacy of culture and spirit of the city being directed (in the media, ideologically and sub-culturally) toward unskilled graphics, wall paintings without content, meaningless and nicely written abbreviations, incessant scribbling of vulgarities, banalities and various names. Although, a children’s graffiti has was created for this long time ago: ”Crazy names can be found everywhere.”
”We should help the talented people. The untalented ones will manage themselves.”