Big art

I've had a few friends and family out to visit now, and they've all commented on the amount of graffiti in east Berlin. Both its ubiquity and size. It really is everywhere, from small doorway ledges to table tennis tables to massive sides of buildings. It comes in lots of different forms - you've got your normal teenager tags and playful stencils, of for example a guy pissing up against the wall, or a dog in space. And as well as graffiti that can be done quickly in the dead of night, there are also intricate works of art which must take days (and therefore need permission) to make.

Over the Oberbaum bridge from Friedrichshain to Kreuzberg, there are always tons of people taking pictures of a huge piece of graffiti of a professional man whose hands are tied together with clock handcuffs. A salutary warning of the dangers of being bound to your work by time that you imagine many of the residents of the bars and clubs around Schlesisches Tor heed. A little further down the road is another of a giant head - made up of many smaller bodies - about to eat one of the small bodies. Answers on a postcard to the meaning of this please. The italian artist who created this - Blu - doesn't just make static images, but - like a cartoon - creates amazing graffiti films like this with characters running over walls, down streets and across buildings.

A little further downstream is another huge piece of art, and this one is firmly in the tourists guides and in the scripts of the many tourists boat comperes that are go out through east Berlin and the canals of Kreuzberg. Molecule man represents the three eastern boroughs of Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Treptower and provides a pretty good backdrop to a riverside run as the sun rises or sets, or a swim in the Badeschiff - a floating swimming pool in the river.

And now - as the city tries to pull more tourists to the east, the graffiti is becoming a tourist attraction in itself. You can buy books about it and get guided tours. And I think this is helping to change how some - who have usually associated it as a form of anti-social behaviour - view graffiti. Less as a sign that demarcates a dodgy ally or run down area, and more as an art form in its own right, which is organic, accessible and collaborative.