Dutch graffiti is excellent and everywhere: all along the train lines, every door, many walls (but strangely not on rolldowns, and no extinguishers). In contrast to the Parisian city graffiti which I found largely simplistic (not true for their highway graffiti which is large, complex, colorful, beautiful), Amsterdam’s graffiti was gritty, somewhat sophisticated (again, this is an American graffiti generalization), and the work was in better dialogue together. Paris is a much larger city, but I really felt the all-city approach of much of the Amsterdam writers and the writers outside the city. On my train to Berlin, for example, I saw SEEM and SAME up every few miles for hundreds of miles it seemed (tongue twister?).
Also, I want to mention BNE. Probably not the first to do it, but the man really is all-world. I felt like i was following him through Amsterdam (in every major square, on many small alleys, in out-of-the-way places, at the Anne Frank house!) and even in the small town of Utrecht that I visited (the oldest city in the Netherlands). I love BNE’s ubiquitous message. It’s official unofficialness. To the untrained eye, it doesn’t look like graffiti, just another public label or sign. And that’s the rub. It’s been said he puts up 10,000 stickers a month. I believe it. Other Americans I spotted: CHAN, Miss17
