As canvases for graffiti go, the skate bowl at Strawberry Hill Park is enigmatic.

A convex structure, the bowl by definition does not thrust itself before the community eye; park users must step up to the lip to see the startling melange of glyphs and idioms scrawled in spray paint across the once-gleaming white concrete. Much different than, say, the facade of a commercial building in a busy urban setting, where such an outbreak would visually assail all passersby.

At the same time, graffiti at a facility devoted to skateboarding seems almost inevitable, an aesthetic by-product of edgy youth culture in a gallery it can call its own.

Does it belong? We’ve printed several letters of late, penned by youths upset by the graffiti and hopeful that park officials will clean it up. By happenstance, photographer Joel Sackett captured some of the images in this week’s “Close to Home” feature, as a backdrop to young aerialists grounded by puddles in the bowl’s bowels.

Park officials say they’re looking into the graffiti that, depending on your point of view, either “adorns” or “blights” a skate park built five years ago after a $100,000 fund drive. There is no specific policy regarding art at the facility; there is also some question as to whether removing the painted images through sandblasting or some other means would damage the skating surface, and whether the community at large really cares about graffiti there anyway.

Do we? There have been whole studies devoted to the

semiotics of “tagging,” which dates back at least as far as Pompeii and emerged as an American phenomenon in post-war urban areas, first as gangs marked their neighborhoods, and later as a form of artistic expression pursued for its own sake. Debate has followed over the extent to which such works – some of them elaborate murals, highly stylized and visually arresting, to be sure – rise above garden-variety vandalism toward some aesthetic ideal. Whatever their artistic merits, graffiti murals are almost always uninvited, and that’s certainly the case at Strawberry Hill. Too, there is the question of just what message is being conveyed. While the casual viewer can usually make little sense of street hieroglyphics, they do impart meaning to someone. And the very presence of graffiti itself often becomes a signifier that a neighborhood has surrendered itself to seedy elements and decay.

As to what seems to be on the minds of our skate bowl artists, the answer would seem to be marijuana, given the number of representations of pot leaves, smoking devices and “blunts” (what your generation used to call “doobies”). Much of the graffiti appears to be nonsense, although one amusing inscription reads, “Set the controls for the heart of the sun,” perhaps a version of Neil Young’s “better to burn out than fade away” contemporized for the younger set.

Taken as a whole, it would be easy to say the skate bowl graffiti symbolizes nothing beyond adolescent ennui. Whether the park district can countenance paintings of marijuana leaves on any of its facilities, that’s another question. At least there is no profanity, no racist slogans, and no representations of private parts.

Perhaps our skateboarders are aesthetes after all.