Last Wednesday, a romantic graffiti artist was jailed for two years for causing damages to public transport estimated at £32,000.
Raymond Agbegah, a 24 years-old IT student and a ‘persistent offender’ spent weeks devotedly spraying multi-coloured graffiti banners on London trains.
The nearly 4m tall paintings immortalised his love for his girlfriend, reading ‘I love Emma’, and wore Agbegah’s usual signature: ‘milk’.
This romantic yet unfortunate defacement of public transport has cost Southern Trains, South West Trains and Network Rail a combined bill of £32,000 for clean-up.
Subjectivity
While some are hailing the likes of Banksy as coming of age artists, not all are finding spray painting a legitimate form of art.
EnCams, the people behind Keep Britain Tidy campaign, for example, claim that ‘graffiti is not art’.
They estimate that graffiti is costing the UK over £1 billion each year. Prosecuting Raymond Agbegah, Judge Martin Beddoe called graffiti ‘an expensive nuisance’.
