Alright, so it might not even seem like a contest. On one hand you’ve got a person with finger control, imagination and guts. On the other you have a stick up and spray merchant. I mean, what, it takes 20 minutes to do a really good, big stencil whereas you’re looking at least at an hour for a good freehand piece.

So why is it that I’m drawn to the stencils as my preferred form of street art? Maybe it’s the increased media attention it’s received thanks to Banksy. Maybe it’s because even I can do the odd piece without any prior experience. Maybe it’s the fact that a good stencil can be just as aesthetic and politically moving as a good quality freehand piece but takes a fraction of the time. Maybe it’s because stencil art hasn’t yet been ruined by tagging.

In my opinion tagging is the lowest form of street art. Existing with the sole purpose of getting a persons name known, it can be done by any fool with a permanent marker.

Some may argue that tags are an integral part of street art and serve a good purpose. Tags can take years to perfect I hear you say…to this I would agree but it doesn’t stop them looking ugly and degrading the rest of the street art world.

The only purpose tags serve are to piss off the rest of the world and lead to calls for councils to clamp down on ‘mindless’ acts of vandalism such as graffiti. For me, graffiti is a genuine art form, one that is slowly getting recognised. For this process to speed up and for genuine graffiti to get the respect it deserves people need to stop spoiling nice fresh walls with their mindless tags and leave their outdoor excursions for genuine pieces, that being freehand or stencil.