Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City

Beautifully written and a pleasure to read, Taking the Train is an amazing study of an underground youth culture and its evolution and growth in the face of numerous moral panics and urban crises. With the help of inspiring ethnographic work and a thorough sampling of the mass media, Austin is able to produce a sincere, thoughtful, and thought-provoking study of an unprecedented art phenomenon that has grown to establish its own rules and methods of prestige and circulation. By charting the writers’ development of tactics in the face of an increasingly hostile media, public policy, and system of surveillance, Austin’s work is an exemplary contribution to the study of popular culture and everyday life.