But nowadays, apart from the tags that kids still write, and probably always will, graffiti seems like an advertisement for itself, or for an overeducated, underemployed class that wants to use the street as a springboard to careers in art, advertising, and fashion.
You will see graffiti, junkyards, abandoned cassette players and a methadone clinic a few doors down from a sleekly laid-out clothing store — elements that are catnip to a certain kind of 26-year-old.
The growing popularity and online presence of far-right anti-Muslim groups like the English Defense League suggests that the threats will continue: Graffiti bearing the group's acronym has been found at several attack sites.
These days, you might spend the night painting a train in a high-security yard, but it's likely the graffiti will be cleaned off before it ever leaves the depot, meaning no one else will ever see it in the flesh.
There is no chance, he said, that the new project will be christened "Graffiti Towers".
But the city has a message for those who believe that tagging trees will give their graffiti permanence: you're barking up the wrong you-know-what.
But if the artists shown here making magic with spray paint are any indication, graffiti will never go out of style.
Whether bound for a landfill or the Atlantic's bleak bottom, a final resting place for the obsolete Redbirds, painted red and so named during a past city campaign to thwart graffiti, will have to be settled soon.
The artist has since been embroiled in a legal row over whether or not the graffiti will need to be removed, having decided - much to the chagrin of Versailles councillor Fabien Bougle — to incorporate the graffiti in a development of the work.
On Tuesday, he and his band, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, will release "Mature Themes" (4AD), the latest willfully odd installment in a discography that has, over the last decade, come to serve as a kind of a thought experiment: What happens to a bedroom artist when the entire online universe is his bedroom?
But within Belarus's democratic opposition, there is disagreement over whether Zubr's street theater and graffiti will backfire in a conservative population, and grumbling about the group's mysterious and easy access to computers, slick protest materials and even the black T-shirts its members wear as a symbol of dissent.
