street art or illegal, what do u think?

I'm a writer myself, I've yet to turn to the legal side of graffiti, I write where I find it suitable. It's an artform as anything else, and personally, if someone can earn houndreds of thousands for painting a few strokes on a canvas, I can't see why we can't express ourselves in the streets, for free! I'm not a big fan of tagging, matter of fact, I find most of it ugly since very few from around here master the art of tags (myself included - my handstyle is ugly). A throwup is no problem to me, and is considered part of the whole graffiti "game", hell I've done all nighters before throwing up around 20-30 times on different locations. In my eyes, it is indeed an artistic talent which some posess (myself is still in the early stages), but there are also ones out there who ruin the culture and shows the public the bad side to graffing. My personal oppinion is that if haven't got anything remotely "pretty" to throw on a wall, stay the hell away from it. I used to just scribble on paper before I started hitting walls, because it was so ugly what I was doing, but I kept doing it on paper, and eventually took the cans in my hands, and it just escalated from there with the first rush you get from painting.