A group of south London graffiti artists were jailed last week for upto two years for defacing public property. Yet as they begin theirsentences, their work is to be championed by a New York gallery.On the face of it, as a society, we seem to be a little mixed-up when it comes to "graffiti", as you call it if you work in the local council`s cleansing department, or "street art" as you say if you`re the chap – and they do mainly seem to be blokes – wielding the spray can. But the confusion now runs deeper than those who spray and those who remove the paint. Great British institutions have been polarised. Last week the might of English law delivered its verdict at Southwark Crown Court where five members of the DPM graffiti crew were jailed – one, Andrew Gillman, for two years – after admitting conspiracy to cause criminal damage costing the taxpayer at least £1m.By contrast, just down the road, the riverside facade of Tate Modern had been covered in giant murals by six urban artists with international reputations, including Blu from Bologna, Faile from New York, and Sixeart from Barcelona, in the first display of street art at a major museum.The courtroom and the museum were so close that supporters of the men on trial popped down to the Tate to do a bit of retouching during one lunchtime adjournment. "There is a huge irony in the juxtaposition of the two events," said one of the artists.The man to credit for bringing street art into established gallery spaces is Banksy. A few years ago he was sneaking his work into galleries such as the Louvre and Tate Britain. Now Tate Modern is selling his book in its gift shop. His works go for hundreds of thousands of pounds and he was recently featured in a retrospective exhibition alongside Andy Warhol. He, more than anyone else, has legitimised the genre and spawned a new generation of young imitators – much to the chagrin of those who want to clean up behind them.Bob has been involved in graffiti since 1982 when he was a punk. He now works, by day, for a London art gallery and describes himself as an upstanding taxpayer. "London is to street art, at the start of the 21st century, what Paris was for Impressionism at the start of the 20th," he says with unfeigned immodesty. "And yet we hate graffiti more than anywhere else in the world. England is by far and away the most draconian for punishments for what are only economic crimes."A gallery in New York launches an exhibition next week based on the work of those convicted at Southwark. "DPM – Exhibit A", at the Anonymous Gallery Project in SoHo, will display large photographs of the convicts` work alongside copies of their charge sheets to ask whether the men are criminals or artists.It is a question which prompts different answers in different parts of the world, says Cedar Lewinsohn, the curator of the exhibition at Tate Modern. "Brazil for instance is more relaxed about it," he says. "In parts of Australia, they are like the UK and people really hate graffiti and tags on vans and trains, but in Melbourne van drivers compete with each other as to whose is more decorated."They have similarly schizophrenic responses in other nations too. In Toronto, police have just hired a street artist to paint walls to help find the man who murdered her brother. Elsewhere in Canada, a court has ruled that, after a police crackdown on graffiti artists, a 28-year-old man is only allowed to venture into town if he is accompanied by his mother. One internet blogger wrote: "In their twenties and still vandalising other people`s property – shouldn`t they have moved on to drug dealing, or perhaps become real estate agents by that age?"Street art, you see, is a highly polarising phenomenon. On the o
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