Second edition, including a new chapter.
The idea that graffiti is either an art or a crime is unimaginative. & yet graffiti is filled with imagination. Unfortunately for our creative (graffiti drenched) minds, common sense understandings have taken control of the narrative of what graffiti means. The good doctor Dumar won’t allow for soulless automatons to describe his passion. With surgeon like precision, Dr. Dumar focuses on one tag (JA) and what it could mean and he finds that it means mucho. Especially over time and space.
This book is a mix between a self-help book and post-philosophy teachings. The book will help you realize the depth of graffiti and what the writers have been doing since 1971, and it will also make you question all that you have been programmed to feel about graffiti. It’s the smartest thing ever written about graffiti, or life for that matter. It turns out graffiti is more important than everything or that depending on the observer anything can seem important and so nothing “is” truly important.
This book feels real good, reads real well and is the last of its kind. We won’t be reprinting this story anymore. This is a collector’s item but really also needs to be read by everybody. This orange edition has a new chapter and couple of different things different from the yellow edition. Dr. Dumar Novy also wrote a real PhD in a German university about the growth of graffiti from child’s play to an original art in the 1970s for which he earned magna cum laude. Both “What Do One Million Ja Tags Signify?” and “Kilroy’s Conformity” come from his actual graffiti research. Buy those 2 books, then you can download the thesis for free, and like that you have years of graffiti research in your hand. & not that fake stuff where people uphold the fantasies and so-called traditions of graffiti, but that real stuff that deconstructs graffiti in order to get to the heart of the question “What Do One Million Ja Tags Signify?”
108 pages, perfect-bound book with wraparound sleeve. Every copy is SIGNED by NOV.