Graffiti: eyesore or art?

Tag, you're it - if you're a graffiti artist.

Spray paint street art is the new rebel art underground, getting popular recognition as police and local communities try to wipe out the "tagging" vandalism that inspires it.

While the city of Charleston tries to crack down on vandals defacing historic building like the McLeod Plantation, colorful emblems and fresco-like fantasy figure landscapes are getting shipped across country — cell phone to cell phone, Facebook to Facebook, Web site to Web site.

The artists have their roots in tagging, the act of scrawling initials, symbols or images across any blank wall as a way of marking territory or saying, look at me, look at what I did. The best of them work with property owners' permission. But not all of them do.

Read more in tomorrow's editions of The Post and Courier