This answer conflates the two different concepts of art, and vandalism. The person creating the graffiti is a vandal, creatively arranged photographs of the resulting vandalism could be marketed by the owner as "art". Consider your car window smashed with a brick - if you took a photograph in the right lighting conditions you might consider the interplay of light to be artful, but that doesn't give the brick wielder copyright protection over the damage they caused.

@MichaelHall Please provide a statute or case law that says copyright does not attach to works done without permission. I think you are inventing law here.

@user71659, Please provide a statute or case law that says property damage is copyrightable art. Because any claim that it is defies conventional wisdom and equally invents law.

@MichaelHall if statute or case law doesn't exclude such work then it isn't excluded...

@Lag, where is the line drawn though? If I throw a brick through your living room window is that copyrightable? Does the answer change if I call it performance art? What if I paint obscenities on your garage door? Copyrightable art?

@MichaelHall look up the copyright status of Banksy's work. Nowhere does anyone argue that the circumstances of its creation are relevant. Obscenities on the garage door are a literary work if they are sufficiently substantial and creative. They could also be a graphic work.

@phoog, will doing so clarify where the line is drawn?

@MichaelHall doing so will clarify that there is no line relating to the circumstances of a work's creation. Whether there is copyright depends only on the nature of the work itself.

@phoog, but what then is "work"? Because the term implies there is some value in the result, and that is purely subjective...

@MichaelHall The point is that the copyrightability of a brick hurled through your window is the same whether it is with permission or without. Simple as that. News footage of riots is certainly copyrightable.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at that last comment...

@MichaelHall the subjective question of what is work comes before courts frequently. If you write a couple of words on my garage door, there's no literary work, but if you do it decoratively it is a work of visual art. If you write an original sonnet on the garage door, that is a literary work and, if you do it decoratively, it is also a work of visual art. This is true regardless of whether I gave you permission.

@user71659 "News footage of riots is certainly copyrightable" I fail to see how this is relevant. Of course it is copyrightable, but I could take footage of the same riot with my camera and your copyright would have no bearing on my footage. By the same token, you could take a picture of graffiti and copywrite that picture, but I could take another picture of it and your copywrite would have no bearing on it.

@GlenYates I agree that the news footage example is poor, but the rest of your comment seems off. In most jurisdictions, copyright is not something you have to do or claim - it is something you have automatically (the right to copy your own creative work). If you take a picture of a graffiti, then you are making a copy of that graffiti; if a court rules that it is a creative work, its creator may refuse you the right to distribute that copy. Your picture may also be in itself a creative work (a derivative work), so you might also be able to refuse others making copies of that.

@GlenYates (Also, not sure if it was just an autocomplete glitch, but "copywrite" is a completely unrelated term from "copyright".)