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'Graffiti' Glitters at the Brooklyn Museum

In New York, crime is down and rents are up. And like other American cities undergoing wide-scale gentrification, a walk through today's New York offers sights of clean streets as much as mean ones.

Graffiti -- the city's most famous symbol of urban anxiety -- no longer grows like ivy on the subway trains. City authorities won that battle in the late 1980s. Still, it's lodged deeply in the city's psyche. And for the moment, it's firmly ensconced in the Brooklyn Museum, in an exhibition simply called, "Graffiti."

Most of the 22 works in the "Graffiti" exhibition feature spray paint on canvas, and come from the early 1980s. The show runs through Sept. 3.

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Corey Takahashi