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Comment by gota | Hacker News Reader

> Seven years on, the world's fourth-largest metropolis and South America’s most important city remains free of visual clutter and eye sore that plagues the majority of cities around the world.

Unfortunately it suffers greatly - to a ridiculous level, in some places - from that ugliest kind of grafitti, convoluted "tags" made in single-stroke black ink

I'm not sure if that is the case everywhere but in Brazil people even have a separate name for that (pichação), to separate it from grafitti (which evokes some form of art)

It is truly staggering the amount of pichação you see in São Paulo. Google "pichação são paulo" to have some idea

Here's an example: https://jpimg.com.br/uploads/2017/04/3914518869-pichacao-em-...

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I kind of love pichação style. It looked really ugly to me at first, but then grew on me as I saw more of it. It feels alien and cryptic and uncomfortable to me as a Westerner. I understand being sick of it if you live there, but as a tourist, it felt special. Local graffiti styles have become so homogenized in the U.S. At one point, script styles were much more local. NY and Philly especially. Eventually, everyone sort of saw and bit off everyone else and it was no longer possibly to tell where a writer was from from their work. São Paulo has a definitely style. Not just the tags, but Batman Alley and the huge public murals. It was the best city I have ever been to for street art.

Graffiti can be beautiful, but it's a problem if it's on buildings that don't want it.

Where I live, stores are constantly fighting a battle against graffiti. They'll paint their walls, and people will graffiti them with ugly tags. People have graffitied over murals, which is just insane. One building had a huge piece of plywood on the wall as a spot where people could make street art. That worked for a few months until someone tagged the whole rest of the building too.

It's not like they're "fighting the man" or anything. These are all locally owned small businesses who are just trying to keep doing their thing.

Maybe I like it as a traveler, don't like as a resident.

I’d take ugly street art over ugly advertisement. At least it’s not trying to manipulate you.

That's false dichotomy. We don't need to choose between two uglies.

I'd rather have none.

I’ll take beautiful street art over beautiful advertisements for the same reason, for what it’s worth.

at least advertisement is not made on the wall of your house without your consent

Yeah, but it's thrown inside my mailbox without my consent instead.

Do you think everyone who lives in a house with a billboard on it are asked to OK the ads?

Much of the graffiti in São Paulo is with the consent of the building owners. Some even pay for it.

Where do lit up displays fit in? Glaring, bright screens with moving images which are visible for miles.

"try to manipulate me"

Not sure if it's manipulation, but I certainly put my consideration for taggers between that of cockroaches and flatworms when I see one of those

I think the documentary about "pixo" is pertinent here, "pixo" is a political manifestation. It is meant to be ugly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skGyFowTzew

These appear to be a worldwide phenomenon, except for places like Switzerland or Singapore.

I'm this close to putting some ethanol into a hand sprayer and just walking around and removing them from places where the medium is permanent marker on laminated surface (usually signs).

> Singapore

A caning and prison time for graffiti seems harsh. It would be interesting to know if the penalty or some other social pressure is what keeps the graffiti down.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-31744029.amp

My bet is that it's the caning. There's something about the promise of physical pain that makes me shudder.

I've seen graffiti in Switzerland, but never on buildings where people lived, because that would inevitably result in multiple calls to authorities from eyewitnesses and swift justice. People have been fined for less in Switzerland.

Penalty plus ubiquitous CCTV: it's very hard to get away with it.

For what it's worth, my understanding the harsh punishments originated from the period in the 1960s when graffiti was mostly Communist propaganda, at a time when neighboring Malaysia was still fighting a very real Communist insurgency.

I don't mind the tags. It's just kids scribbling and it's neutral and ignorable to me. Neither ugly nor worth paying attention to.

I absolutely abhor advertising that pollutes outdoor spaces. So I guess it depends on your values.

I'm OK with that. Vandalizing buildings is obviously a crime but I'd rather look at street art and vandalism than ads. At least it has soul.

does the amount of tagging/bombing influence the rent prices there?

You've likely got cause and effect reversed.

pixo é arte

I'm not arguing for or against that - I'm just stating a fact (there's a lot of pichação in São Paulo) and an opinion (I find it extremely ugly, even if I do like grafitti, including the more artistic and colorful tags)

> to separate it from grafitti (which evokes some form of art)

You seemed to be implying pixo is not art tho. Funny thing is, American use of the world graffiti was precisely to deride stuff that they didn't consider 'urban/street art'. Just some youth made graffiti tags...

I guess its because in context I meant to separate Art (as is human search for meaning and expression not for the purposes of survival and reproduction) from art (as in technically developed and aesthetically pleasing)

Pixação may be Art, but it is ugly (which is subjective)

I don't see how the distinction adds any value to the conversation. Besides, if you think ugliness is subjective, you should say you consider pixo ugly, not that it is. This whole 'capitalized concept' is sounds very pretentious to me. Pixo is art, you may not like it, but there certainly is technical development built into it and some people find it pleasing or it wouldn't exist. Insisting in keeping it out of some definition of art just seems to me like a way to deride it in a way that you can justify intellectually. I don't like it. I find it very ugly. But I don't feel the need to create some art category it doesn't belong to in order to justify my opinion.

more like lixo am I right fellas

We can’t really legislate what is art and what isn’t. The previous government wanted to make Brazilian art “heroic” and we all know how it ended.

Western modern culture has this nihilistic stroke of loving everything that is ugly and decadent.

For some unknown reasons, a certain segment of the petit bourgeoisie became convinced that is some sort of being highly sophisticated and cultured to pretend to love this kind of garbage.

And the funniest thing is that the conservative right calls this "cultural-marxism", when it is obvious to everyone who has ever read Marx seriously that he would probably abhor this kind of stuff.

Living in the late stages of capitalism is funny like that.

the building climbing graffiti is dope, you're 100% wrong

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