On Friday, in the midst of the kind of bitter Michigan cold that normally makes one unsociable, at least until alcohol warms the blood, I hopped in my salt-stained car and met friends at the Shangri La gallery in the Atlas Building on Gratiot, for a show featuring murals by local graffiti artists.

Never have I been to an art exhibit where the artists hide their faces from cameras so much. It was one of those rare art openings where my disapproval of the artists featured (The Leather Jackets, among others), outweighed my admiration of their skills, which they clearly possess but often waste on vandalizing historic buildings.

I suppose graffiti is inevitable in a major city, but it seems some graffiti artists at least try to confine their work to dilapidated heaps, abandoned factories or bland concrete overpasses, whereas the major purveyors in this town don’t seem to have the aesthetic sense not to spray-paint beautiful historic buildings (The Madison-Lenox Hotel), culturally significant buildings (the Motown headquarters) or dozens of small apartment buildings whose brickwork is in itself a form of long-lost art. You might as well go to the Rare Book Room at the Detroit Public Library and doodle on the 140-year-old books there, for it has about the same artistic merit as spray-painting a silly name on initricate Art Deco brickwork. It’s attempting to put art over another form of art, always a crime in itself.

It’s disappointing that a building can stand for a century, surviving economic devastation, blight, and the elements, until some kid who is ignorant of its history and blind to its beauty suddenly decides it’s his or her personal canvas.

But I wasn’t there to sneer, or take photos of everything there, or invite myself to explore the rest of the building, though I did all those things, as well as explore the high-ceilinged gallery and mingle with the odd assortment of patrons, whose drink of choice was a bottle in a brown paper bag.

I mainly wanted to see what the graffiti kids could do in a legitimate setting, with an officially sanctioned canvas. I mean, how long can you continue spray-painting slum walls at 4 a.m. while looking over your shoulder like an errant child? It’s the same as a writer confining his work to public restrooms – at some point, if you can’t graduate to legitimate showings or appearances, perhaps you’re not really all that talented.

But these guys are indeed talented; in fact, some of the larger works they have around town in obscure places are breathtaking. The question is can they take it to the next level and apply it to real life or continue vandalizing and destroying other people’s things in order to make themselves and their crew snicker? Destroying other people’s art, even if it’s only the simple elegant pattern put down by a bricklayer, doesn’t make someone an artist. It makes them a common vandal. And that demonstrates no talent at all.