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Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession

hegemonic conscription through collaborative erasures and creations that vacillate between eyesore and icon for those who engage them. Rhetorical scholars will find the spaces and encounters Bruce describes to be inviting opportunities to reimagine tensions between constitutive and contingent forces at work in scenes of rhetorical invention. The best insights for these readers may come near the end of chapter five, which outlines the rhetorical moves and cultural contradictions in the protracted legal battle over 5Pointz. Here, we find graffiti artists trying to navigate a perilous path through legitimizing aesthetic categories and encroaching commercial interests that would preserve graffiti art at the risk of obliterating its communal origins and blunting its critical edges. Bruce also explores the capacity for rhetoric to move in the small fissures between social script and creative intervention that matter in many other arenas, thereby pushing scholars to attend to the collective process and reiterative character of rhetorical agency. If pressed to offer criticism, I will admit that I would have welcomed more aesthetic scrutiny, a wider range of theorists, and some acknowledgment of textual elements challenging central claims. For example, some of the characterizations and conflicts that emerge in interviews or artworks evidence a yearning for graffiti as a form of resistance, although the author sets this angle aside (perhaps due to ample coverage elsewhere). Age remains an understudied factor despite the striking difference between the wizened veterans the book showcases and the rebellious youth trope of policy tracts. The book mentions the influence of murals memorializing those slain on the streets, but police violence, racial profiling, and battles over territory or trade do not feature as key themes. Yet Painting Publics is an impressive tour of international graffiti that brings along concepts from rhetorical studies, political theory, and art history to enhance our appreciation of actual street artists—even as it undermines familiar fantasies about graffiti’s ethos. This book is likely to shape conversations about urban aesthetics in years to come, as rhetorical scholars turn considerable attention to the prospects for shared spaces to make public life more hospitable.