The Internet has been eulogizing like never before in the last week, with opinion and emotions sprouting, like mushrooms, on blogs and their comment sections in the days since Michael Jackson’s death. Popular modes and tones of commemoration flit by as the Internet community travels through the stages of grief, and everyone is having a go. There’s an incongruous feeling of exhilaration in the air. Saturation is inevitable. To that end, there’s only three points we’d like to quietly note—without platitudes and with respect—after reading about the death of pioneering graffiti artist Michael Martin, AKA Iz the Wiz, at age 50 on June 16th. 1- Martin suffered kidney failure, and lived the last 13 years of his life on dialysis, as a result of the fumes he had been inhaling after painting for decades without protection. 2- He never found a way to live off his work and his name, never in Paris, never in Tokyo, nowhere. 3- He developed his full-car pieces in a pre-1975 climate when the MTA didn’t have an anti-graffiti task force. Wait so that means there was a time when graffiti existed and the MTA didn’t care?

nytimes.com