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Over the past few weeks, dozens of graffiti artists spray-painted over 27 floors of an abandoned luxury real estate project in downtown Los Angeles. The street art brought new attention to Oceanwide Plaza – a $1 billion project that has been stalled since 2019. The building, located at 12th and South Flower Streets, across from the Grammy Museum and Crypto.com Arena, which hosted the 66th Grammy Awards on Sunday, the 5th of February, made headlines due to the extensive tagging that occurred on its exterior. At the end of January, graffiti artists broke into the Oceanwide Plaza skyscraper development and tagged its floors with bright, bold letters. The work was a collaboration between local artists, who tagged the complex and spray-painted the building’s windows with phrases like “set the pace,” “amen,” and “forever.”
Oceanwide Plaza was intended to be a massive mixed-use development spanning an entire city block, featuring over 500 luxury condos and a five-star hotel occupying three towers reaching up to 55 stories. The project, initiated in 2015 with a budget of $1 billion, was put on hold in 2019 when the Chinese-backed developer Oceanwide Holdings ran out of funding. Since then, it has remained empty.
For the artists involved, spray-painting the building was a way to breathe life into a deteriorating area of the city. “This building has needed love for years,” graffiti artist Aker, who helped tag the towers, told Hyperallergic. “If the owners aren’t doing anything about it, the streets of L.A. are happy to make something out of it.”
Artists said that by entering the building, they easily avoided the few guards patrolling because a security firm hired to protect the site had recently sued the developer for not paying them. After entering through holes in the fence, the artists ascended several flights of stairs, carrying buckets of paint, rollers, spray paint cans, and ladders. Infamous LA graffiti artist DOKTER1, along with his crew NCT, was among the first to target the building on January 27th. He covered three lower floors of the tower, and a few days later, ascended to the 48th floor, where he added his tag over three of the upper windows. Several artists mentioned that police helicopters circled the building while they painted, but they observed little police presence otherwise.
After a few days, police presence increased. On the 2nd of February, by the time police officers arrived, all the artists except for two had fled the location. The other two were arrested, cited, and released. Daron Burgundy, a street photographer, said that he could see people on the balcony tagging when police came. “There was a crew on one of the floors, and people were coming out and getting detained. People were still in there tagging while the cops were down here,” he said.
After that, a rather sensationalist NBC video came out, followed by a statement from the Central City Association, an advocacy group for downtown businesses, that cited the “vandalism” as a “representation of the very real neglect that DTLA (Downtown Los Angeles) has gone through over the past decade.”
Last week, police announced on Twitter that “additional security measures” would be implemented in the future and that “the graffiti will be removed.” “Our people remain at the site as the City mobilises resources to remove the graffiti and fortify the location,” LAPD Chief Michel Moore posted Saturday on Twitter. “This isn’t art. It’s a crime.”
On Feb. 9, the L.A. City Council voted through a measure to have the buildings cleaned and secured by Feb. 17.
However, Stefano Bloch, a former L.A. graffiti artist and current professor of geography at the University of Arizona, doesn’t view graffiti as a senseless crime. He expressed support for the taggers making use of abandoned space, believing that graffiti is a subcultural art form. “As much as people are entitled to not like what the graffiti writers do, I would encourage people to respect the effort to use the space that nobody else seems to be caring about right now… It’s graffiti writers who find value in these spaces and enliven them,” he said. “That’s not to romanticise it as art or to demonise crime. Someone was making use of this building, and it wasn’t the builder or the occupants.”
Popular street artist Banksy once said, “To some people, breaking into property and painting it might seem a little inconsiderate, but in reality, the 30 square centimeters of your brain are trespassed upon every day by teams of marketing experts. Graffiti is a perfectly proportionate response to being sold unattainable goals by a society obsessed with status and infamy. Graffiti is the sight of an unregulated free market getting the kind of art it deserves.”
In the 1960s and 70s, early graffiti writers viewed street art as an arena for people to protest, riot, rebel, or reflect on ongoing socio-political events. Using the idiom “take to the streets,” they began tagging their names across the urban landscapes of New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. As graffiti spread outward across the U.S., Street Art evolved to encompass any visual art created in public locations, specifically unsanctioned artwork. The underlying idea behind Street Art grew out of the belief that art should function in opposition to, and sometimes even outside of, the hegemonic system of laws, property, and ownership; be accessible rather than hidden away inside galleries, museums, and private collections; and be democratic and empowering, so that all people (regardless of race, age, gender, economic status, etc.) can create art and have it seen by others.
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