No, every Graffiti artist is a vandal. If you disagree, give me your address, I'll be happy to graffiti your car, your house, your TV, and your laptop and be a superhero!. If you don't like that you're a hypocrite!
I always wish I had the guts to go into a museum showing off a graffiti artist's graffiti and graffiti it.
Note: that's a separate question from whether or not the person is a talented artist.
People call it 'advertising'. It's someone's or some company's tag and their design, and this graffiti is all over the place in the city (and some in the country too), and nobody likes it. I've never seen advertising that I would keep there if I had a choice, and it fills cities - just imagine a city without it.
Why should the wealthy, already with enormously loud voices, get to 'graffiti' the city and kids trying to express themselves and have any voice at all get criticized and arrested? I know the literal answer is property rights. In this case, that system excludes 99.x% from any voice or public expression; the real question is about justice and public good. (It's a philosophical question to explore the issues, not a policy proposal.)
There’s also a lot of space given over to graffiti, some more industrial spaces have completely embraced it, with whole lengths of walls and buildings allowing it. sharing with communal spaces such as as music venues and skate parks.
I think every underpass is also allowed, and fresh work appears every so often.
All the street furniture throughout the city, electrical boxes etc, are all uniquely decorated and it still cheers me when i see a new one.
I really do like the street furniture one, which is pretty much everywhere in my city, it was organized by a local art group and involved many artists
Honestly think it’s a good thing
Let's be honest: most graffiti we see every day is not art made in good faith. It's vandalism. And I'm not absolutist about it: I can appreciate a beautiful urban painting, just not when it's on the wall to someone's house or shop. Usually a few rude words scribbled in an emotional outburst, or - contrary to the article's point - somebody's literal signature. It's ugly, and its point is to annoy you, or at least annoy someone.
At the same time, billboards and advertisements are a cancerous growth that we don't have the courage to excise. And where we do, such as in protected historic areas, the landscape becomes beautifully transformed. I guess most people don't care, they just eat it up and accept the reality as it is - or rather, as it is forcefully pushed down their throats by corporations and aesthetically bankrupt business owners.
I rarely see it in those places (especially homes), and mostly see it in public places like underpasses, abandoned buildings, parking lots (which are often private, to be fair), etc. Your experience may vary, of course.
Also, if I pay you to advertise on your building, that's only two of us deciding: from the public's point of view, it's no better than unilateral. (Or you could put your own advertisement, such as your business name, on your building.)
I wonder, were any sort of uprising against public advertising to take hold, if they'd "volunteer" some existing ad space to go to artistic endeavors or something. Like affordable housing set-asides, but so you can look at something culturally-enriching instead of having to watch That Damn Progressive Ad (you know the one) for the nth time.
Havana
I won’t touch on the property issue because it’s really tiresome - sometimes I wish there were working communists countries so these people could simply go there and we wouldn’t have to suffer them.
But it’s really the first part of this quote that gets me: it’s precisely the fact that graffitti is forced on us that makes me despise it so much. Imagine having to listen to anyone aspiring artist’s bad poetry when you’re on and about. It’s not much better than appreciating strangers’ music taste on the street or public transit. It’s worse than advertisement: at least ads are bland and repetitive, you can easily filter them out.
> When I see DEFUND BPD hovering above North Avenue in enormous, spray-painted letters, I don’t see the opinion of one idealistic graffiti artist; I see someone expressing an increasingly common sentiment.
There are many graffitis out there asking non-politely that refugees go back to their homeland or that certain kinds of people are not welcome. I suppose, maybe unfairly, that the author would consider these demonstrations a noisy hateful minority speaking for themselves and their little minds. That’s the positive side of living in a democracy: we shouldn’t need to trust that rogue public demostrations, due to the central limit theorem or something, converge on the public sentiment. We have elections for that.
And I don’t disagree that graffitti has artistic merit, however illegal or unpleasant to my eyes. I’m not that egocentric. I just think there are things more important than art.
> I just think there are things more important than art.
Sure, nothing is absolutely important, but what's the higher priority here?
> It’s worse than advertisement: at least ads are bland and repetitive, you can easily filter them out.
... that you can 'easily filter them out'? (Ads are generally far larger, well-lit, more prominent and designed to be hard to filter.)
> That’s the positive side of living in a democracy: we shouldn’t need to trust that rogue public demostrations, due to the central limit theorem or something, converge on the public sentiment. We have elections for that.
A side of living in democracy is that free expression is restricted to voting? ???
banksy can fuck off
Not a chance I'm going to read this insanely long essay.
As I grew up I read Subway Art, Spraycan Art and watched Style Wars. Played Jet Set Radio and Marc Ecko's Getting Up. As well as watching whatever AEROHOLiCS releases I could find uploaded to P2P sites.
I would photograph the graffiti whenever I went on a holiday and took SLR photos in my city.
I still get excited when I see bombed cargo trains on my commute to $DAYJOB. But sadly that rush of excitement is gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall#/media/File%3ABerl...
Guess which side is which. :-) I know what side I would have rather lived on at least.
IMO, this is a complete misunderstanding of why we have rules about who can do what to things. It is true that most of the time, if you actually do a deep-dive, property ownership is arbitrary. It reflects a history of violence, domination, control, power and is rarely rooted in any kind of philosophy that anyone except a sociopath could defend. Yes, of course, there are the empty corner cases - someone makes something entirely by themselves from a resource who supply is not locally or globally constrained, and claims ownership of it based on the labor and conception they put in. But these are tiny subset of actual property ownership situations, and the big picture really doesn't support the sort of claims that propertarians like to make for "the rules".
However, it is not meaningless. Most of us do not want to live in a society where anyone can do anything to anything at any time. It can be simultaneously true that the rules we have are arbitrary and unfair AND ALSO that we do want some kind of rules and these are the ones we have right now.
So by all means propose, refine, campaign for, enact better rules that control who can do what to what and when and how. But pretending that any such rules are arbitrary and meaningless is destructive and doesn't help us move towards a more equitable (or art-filled) society.
nephihaha•1mo ago
Most of the graffiti I see around is some garbage about football (soccer) clubs or someone's tag/signature. That stuff isn't usually entertaining or very artistic. It's usually monochrome.
There is a very basic reason that graffiti tends to be in the city. It is where most people live and people don't usually go out into the countryside with hundreds of spray cans.
mmooss•1mo ago