Each and every time I’ve been confronted by bathroom-stall graffiti, I’ve felt paralyzed, too… Each and every time I’ve been confronted by bathroom-stall graffiti, I’ve felt paralyzed, too awed to contribute my own message. I’ve sat on countless occasions, staring in wonder, unable to imagine which 7.3 words I could add, knowing I’d never manage to produce even sufficiently expressive stick figures.

I’ve read some cunning commentaries that were damn near Shakespearean in eloquence. These artists showed their mastery of brevity by cleverly crossing out one name and replacing it with another: Bush for Kerry, Tommy for Jenny. A few with a very personal agenda even managed the truly nefarious addition of “your mom.”

These brave men — and possibly women, though I can’t say from personal experience — are in a perpetual battle with soulless paint rollers, servants of the Man.

For those who don’t know him, the Man is comprised of those shallow old men and women who have labeled feelings that are openly expressed and genuine as vulgar. Even some who call themselves liberal frown upon the creation of this art, claiming respect for private property as a defense. They’re only trying vainly to disguise their bourgeois sensibilities.

Graffiti isn’t the only form of art under attack by this capitalist system that provides people with what they’re told they want instead of what they need.

While our lives may be shaped by our actions — our shrieks, tears, sighs, songs, whispers, grunts, moans and whimpers — our most private feelings and our most absurd thoughts color and shade those outlines.

Art, true art, then demands that our actions take the necessary shape.

Sadly, the most common examples of brilliantly applied creative power these days demand only one action: Buy, and buy now. Advertisers accomplish this goal by subtly linking the seemingly unrelated.

Cell phones link to friendship, alcohol to sex, diamonds to sex, sandals to sex, cheeseburgers to coping with no sex.

In a world where 30,000 movies are available to rent online; music stores put Led Zeppelin, Maroon 5, Ashanti, The Bee Gees and Hilary Duff in the same section, and the same three impressionist paintings in every art classroom, there just aren’t that many ways to discern what is actually art.

Not even Sisyphus could appreciate the frustration felt by an honest youngster (Let’s call him Joe) trying to distinguish art from kitsch, the inept from the contrived, entertainment from propaganda.

The simplest, the most American approach is to look at the price tag. If someone with money is buying it, it’s got to have value. The art on the wall of a $2 million home must have more meaning than the photocopies stuck onto the walls of my apartment.

Another fantastic approach is to trust people who use far too many syllables to discuss subjects in a nearly unintelligible manner. Pretentious truths, conveyed in a nebulous style, fill books like the Walden-inspired masterpiece, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”

Young Joe, confusing the meanings of “primitive” and “nebulous” with “primordial” and “cosmic,” stumbles into a few hundred pages of pain that may well repel him from literature the way a crucifix necklace repels me from a girl.

While not every heartfelt diary entry, no matter how earnestly rephrased, can be called art, there’s no border keeping art inside museums and opera houses, no matter how desperately the financial elite and fashionably intellectual try to pretend there is.

The entire creative output of all humanity is the birthright of each new life, but it’s a lot to ask of Joe to spot and pluck Charles Bukowski from a table that’s also displaying Danielle Steele’s latest contribution and “Seventy-Two Ways to Tie a Shoe: The Universalist’s Guide to Dressing Oneself.”

Every corporate investment shamefully misrepresented as meaningful further withers our ability to perceive, create and participate in art until all we can really agree on is that some things are just too bodily, too foul, too crass to be anything but vulgarity.

Send your most pristine vulgarities to Zak Sharif at [email protected].