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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

> these are distinct forms of street art

Can you elaborate on this? I've always thought a mural was just a type of graffiti?

> Can you elaborate on this? I've always thought a mural was just a type of graffiti?

According to Wikipedia it’s the opposite: a graffiti is a type of mural [1]. However at least in French and in Italian a graffiti is an inscription on a wall, often done as vandalism, while a mural(e) is more like a fresco which often takes the full wall.

As a French, for me this [2] is a mural and this [3] is a graffiti.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mural

[2]: https://www.parisenigmes.com/PICTURE/street-art-paris13.webp

[3]: https://cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/lep...

Weird, in Brazil is the other way! Graffiti in Brazil is art, for vandalism we call pixação.

Is graffiti always text? I know it's common but I didn't realise it was a rule.

What about something like this https://maps.app.goo.gl/oCbe2DZW1vqyXJ2h9?g_st=ic

This thread is showing how words have different meanings in different places. In my slice of the world, graffiti is not limited to text. A tag is though.

They're both graffiti. Graffiti can be beautiful or art to some people or not be. But if the person did not build the building with that mural/art on it to start, or did it at a later date as part of the same project, it is graffiti in the modern sense of the word (in English).

People thinking it is art, or thinking it is beautiful does not remove the aspect of it being graffiti. Even a large advertisement would be graffiti.

I would hate to live in a building that had a huge mural go up after I moved in personally, but that also doesn't make it graffiti or not.

In Germany, graffiti is the overarching category and the vandalism are called "tags"

That’s also how it’s referred to here in the Midwestern US

It's the same in France actually

My litmus test is "was it asked to be put there". I live in Denver and after we won the NBA finals a local artist put this up this[1] mural and it was coordinated with the business + building owner + local govt. I would call that a "mural" versus "graffiti". Now if you go out to our "warehouse district" you will often see "graffiti", that is stuff the owners never asked for, some kids just showed up and tagged the building in the middle of the night.

[1]: https://media1.westword.com/den/imager/u/magnum/17103041/ima...

Graffiti is usually tagging [1], but includes other forms of (non-sanctioned) random acts of art and, especially, writing.

Wall murals are usually sanctioned – either there is permission granted to paint a wall, or, often, they are commissioned. Usually there is only one artist or company that makes the "complete" mural, with much planning and coordination, and no intervention by casual passerby.

In the source below, you can see that though it is wall, it is being tagged (not a mural) with various ad-hoc contributors.

Some would argue that a wall that is purposefully provided as a space for passerby to add their contributions (to add "graffiti" to it) makes it not graffiti at all, since that goes against its anti-institutional spirit. In that view, commissioned wall murals by an artist are distinctly not grafitti.

1 – https://www.britannica.com/topic/tagging

This seems like a separation that's a little too clean to fit reality. Does that hard line of distinction really exist?

Certainly there are clear examples on both ends of the spectrum, but here's some closer to the boundaries of your definition from my own hometown - I wonder how you'd classify these:

1. This street of sanctioned individual pieces, mostly "tags" but elaborate full-wall pieces each by an individual tagger: https://maps.app.goo.gl/byceFqUQSaTeun2q6?g_st=ic

2. This unsanctioned (currently in court) full-building mural done by an ad agency: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/73/60/f6/7360f64042a71f241fe8...

---

(personally I'd call the sanctioned tags both murals and graffiti, and definitely classify them as art, but I'd only call the ad agency piece a mural; neither graffiti nor art - though I fully acknowledge that last judgement is a subjective one and not something universal)

I'd use my "especially writing" heuristic here to separate the two – graffiti comes from the Greek root "graph" (to write), right? So even though 1 contains elaborate and beautiful full wall pieces, I would still consider them "graffiti," especially because they seem spontaneous productions by citizens (taking back the architecture of the city into their own hands!) and not commissioned by an agency.

The involvement of the ad agency (i.e., an institution of some sort) and lack of writing would make 2 certainly not graffiti, despite the subversion of the law. We could call it vandalism, actually. Beautiful vandalism in the form of a wall mural!

The trickiest to define is something like the Berlin wall – if I'm not mistaken, the city gave permission for anyone to come draw/tag to their hearts' content all along portions of a wall. Does permission make it not graffiti? Some would say yes. Personally, I disagree – if it is writing rather than drawings, I still consider it graffiti, minus any perjorative associations of the word. Grafitti is an art form too.

Yes grandparent is splitting hairs. Mural means wall, graffiti means tracing or drawing. There's probably a few taxonomies out there but they will be arbitrary and the whole point of street art is to get around gatekeepers.

ehh not really, throw ups are different from tags which are different from murals - muruals often aren’t graffiti because they require more time, which tends to require permission

Basically the difference is that the mural is bigger and probably has the building owners consent, but in terms of aesthetics it's a tossup. Most murals seem to be abstract visual noise that is scarcely better than average graffiti, and on the other hand some rare graffiti is far above average. And then there are the murals with a message, which often end up looking like Soviet propaganda posters (or in fact murals, since the Soviets were big on murals too). Huge images of some local leaders linking arms with workers to deliver symbolic world peace or some tacky saccharine sweet bs like that.

If I'm being honest, a lot of these Soviet murals actually demonstrate superior technical skill and aesthetic understanding than the murals in my town (many of which aren't worthy to hang on a mother's refrigerator): https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/10/the-forgotten-soviet-e...

Throw ups are different to tags but I still don't think that explains how graffiti is distinct from mural, unless you're trying to say all graffiti is unsanctioned, which... isn't really the case.

yeah not all graffiti is unsanctioned, but I think it’s often about style? I wouldn’t consider most murals in my area graffiti

Graffiti is done without permission, by definition.

Murals can be without permission as well - a work can be both things. And graffiti can be done with permission - in general, folks are wanting a "street art" style work.

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