Mark Adam's letter to you last week, declaring that "youths need an outlet" was a clear indication of how his own education in art had been 'sidelined', as he himself puts it.

If he believes that allowing our young boys and girls to deface and despoil their environment will help them become more artistic and articulate people, he is way off beam. It is not art. It is the equivalent of children pulling legs of spiders, of peeling wallpaper off where they shouldn't, of tor-menting dogs and cats and of bullying weaker children.

A youth is not driven to leave his 'tag' on a blank canvas. He leaves his 'tag' where other have left theirs, much like a dog urinates over the scent of other dogs. Leaving buildings and walls and fences covered with inexpressive scrawl has the effect of dumbing down all our expectations of how our environment should look. We get used to seeing it there and eventually it becomes the norm. If two and three year olds attend a nursery that is extensively defaced, they will think nothing of doing likewise when they are eleven and twelve.

Tell us Mark Adam, if a child of yours expressed himself freely over the lovely beige walls of your sitting room., would you leave it there for all to ponder, much like a Turner Prize exhibition, or would you paint it out and risk giving him a 'blank canvas'?

G Harvey

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December 5, 2001 13:32