* Orientation - some images are sideways,
* Option to walk through by date order, and by location ...
There is an audience for the time ordered flux of images on particular sites (at least in Australia).
I submit Irish Graffiti I see here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Graifiti/
Though I think displaying these things as a map is more useful: https://streetartcities.com/cities/sanfrancisco
There is a an Irish artist called Dan Leo and I have bought lots of his prints. https://www.danleodesign.com/ so they are dotted around my office and home.
I think they're great! He does animals and I love the style, clean lines and bright colours, they remind me of US football team logos.
I particularly love seeing peoples stickers about.
Sure, you can point to examples of graffiti that don't look all that bad, and I imagine some examples can even be considered to improve the look of a space. But taking this site as a random sample, the "good" ones are a vanishing minority. For every subtle Invader mosaic high on a building, you get dozens of effortless name tags that just wreck the look of a place.
Adding frustration is the fact that there's no way to effectively dissuade people from doing this. You don't want to fine, jail or otherwise ruin the lives of thousands of kids to get them to stop. You just want them to stop spraypainting shit. It's really the only example I can think of where I'd support some form of corporal punishment. Catch kids in the act, 20 lashes in the town square to convince them not to do it again, then set them to work with a wire brush until they can demonstrate that it's back to the state they found it. Even still, I can't imagine it would really do much to dissuade.
It's a shame.
As long as there have been walls there has been graffiti. Spaces without graffiti are artificial and antiseptic.
I agree there is a spectrum. On one hand you've Banksy or Basquiat adding to a flat grey wall and creating art that has a political voice or some artistic merit and the other you've some twat scribbling hate symbols on a historic monument. I don't have on ideas on how we can ensure one and not the other though.
https://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/
Graffiti is a population's expression of ownership of their city. It's a very common form of countercultural resistance and therefore an important relief valve. It's a way for anyone to express themselves on their environment. A city only has value because it's occupied by many people, and those people need to express their autonomy and quite literally "leave their mark."
Not to mention, it's lovely to be connected to a common thread of humanity over literal millenia. Just as I scrawled onto a bathroom stall in 2005 "Cameron takes it up the bum," so too did Salvius write of his friend on a wall in the House of the Citharist in the year 79, "Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this."
It's ok
Side scrolling in portrait is not my opinion of working great. It does work to view them at least. Youre trapped in a vertical scroll, no way to get back to the beginning but scroll all the way back.
[1] https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picha%C3%A7%C3%A3o - I recommend looking into a machine translated version of the Portuguese Wikipedia article, as the English Wikipedia article reads far more biased
I expect the mundane "wildstyle" tagging on train cars but have been surprised a few times to see trains roll through town with much more complex graffiti. I'm happy to see examples of some of that more artful work in this post.
If you've seen the film, "Brother From Another Planet" you might look at graffiti a little differently as I do. :-)
wumms•1h ago
kg•1h ago