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Comment by muditsahni | Hacker News Reader

It’s always a struggle for me to accept that many people actually like graffiti. Maybe graffiti can add flavour to a city if it’s really drab and ugly (although I’m not too sure about this), but it only defiles cities which are aesthetically pleasing and beautiful. The technicality of graffiti has little to do with its appeal or it’s appropriateness. Something can be hard to make but still be garbage and/or misplaced w.r.t it’s surroundings.

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Most so-called ‘pleasing’ cities are full of advertisement pollution. If I have to choose one of them, I’d choose art over advertising.

I wish people would be as much against advertising as they are against graffiti.

Fr. Its so wierd for me when people get super mad about graffiti like they own any of these walls and could choose what was on them. If the graffiti wasn't there it would just be an ad, but I guess we're okay with that because consumerism is good because the our overlords tell us to like it.

Most graffitis I've seen are on empty walls or buildings with no ads. Brick wall looks way better without them. And to me it looks more like it's the graffiti maker that thinks that they own the wall and can choose what should be on it.

Property that is used by the public should be owned by the public. By that logic, graffiti artists as regular people who use public infrastructure in the area should as much right to paint on the wall as you do to paint the wall in your house. And you can paint over it if you hate it so much. But its all down to the community. It should not be a crime enforced by a ruling class who nominally owns the wall but doesn't use it, so is totally not actually inconvenienced by it being painted. You are part of the community. So is the artist. The person who owns the wall is mostly likely not. Stop pretending you're on the same side because you think you may also become a millionare by osmosis.

I'm not thinking that I'm on some side or defending some class. As you said, I'm part of the community, the public. Why should the right to have wall painted override the right to have the wall as it is? I'm betting most would want it without graffitis, but apparently one person can decide themselves how it should look. It's a simple conflict of opposing tastes.

Again, they have the right to have that taste and you have the right to hate it. You both should have equal ownership over the wall. Therefore you should also have the right to paint something they don't like on the wall. Or paint over their art. Or paint a different wall in a way you like. Nobody should be prosecuting anyone for the case of a minor disagreement over personal artistic taste.

What if I'm not skilled enough to paint it back to how it was? Or don't want to break the law. Or some other barrier. My point is that if given equal rights, it isn't clear cut if you should paint at all. For example, on dedicated graffiti walls the situation is different since people generally agree how they should be used. Sure, one way to solve a conflict is to let everyone do what they want and see what happens, but it's just a version of "might makes right", imo.

If we decided on all public use of space collectively, then yeah sure that would probably be better since it would be fairer. Unfortunately, this is not the system we live under. Therefore graffiti is a legitimate way for the community to express themselves in the face of undemocratic rule.

Yeah this seems on-brand. Graffiti artist imagines himself as the hero in some epic class struggle, anyone who opposes him must be an enemy sympathizer!

In reality we just want to live in a city that doesn’t have ugly graffiti all over it.

It’s OK, when you grow up you’ll understand. Walking little kids past a wall that reads FUCK because “the community” (aka a single edgy teen) decided it should is not a comfortable experience.

I have nieces and nephews and if I walked past a wall with them that reads FUCK i'd probably laugh and tell them its a bad word and move on with my life.

Would it still be funny if it was a swastika? Or the n-word? Is that also a part of your glorious fight against evil capitalists? If not, why is it any less legitimate? Clearly the “community” must want it there if it was left up.

If it was a swastika or the n-word I would be very concerned about the nature of the community in that neighbourhood and if I'm in danger. But in terms of how i'd deal with kids seeing it, I'd take it as a teachable moment. I don't have to hide my kids from everything I don't believe in (besides they probably see crazy shit online anyway), I just need to teach them how to deal with it. Anyway, theres a wall near where i live where someone has made a massive mural making a political statement. People keep defacing it with the opposite opinion, and people keep painting back over that. If you really need the authorities to tell your community that swastika graffiti should make them angry and call them to action, then your community is screwed already. Either way, yeah just as we have laws to deal with incitement to violence and hatespeech we can have that with walls if you'd prefer, it just has to be sth actually extreme and targeted.

A “teachable moment” like this is not how childless people imagine it to be, with the parent didactically educating the child with words of wisdom. Instead, the kid absorbs what they see or hear and it appears later on in their drawings or what they say on the playground. Children understand the power of transgression and all ideas are eligible for them to play with.

Bro I knew what a swastika and the nword was at that age. And yeah, probably I took them too lightly sometimes because I was a kid and its a learning process. But I knew they were wrong. Because my parents taught me right and wrong. How stupid do you think kids are? I used to pray for the victims of ww2 when they told us to pray in assembly. I wasn't a 6 year old neo-nazi because I knew what a swastika looked like.

Your comment is baffling, bordering nonsensical.

> If it was a swastika or the n-word I would be very concerned about the nature of the community in that neighbourhood and if I'm in danger.

If you lived in a large city like NY or London and you saw a random swastika, your immediate reaction would be to blame your neighbors? How do you know it wasn’t someone from somewhere else?

> If you really need the authorities to tell your community that swastika graffiti should make them angry and call them to action, then your community is screwed already.

Hopefully nobody needs the authorities to tell them things, but they do need authorities to help them enforce already agreed-upon laws. I can’t spent my time running around cleaning up all the graffiti.

Do you think it should be the duty of citizens to stop bank robbers, too?

> Either way, yeah just as we have laws to deal with incitement to violence and hatespeech we can have that with walls if you'd prefer, it just has to be sth actually extreme and targeted.

We literally already have this which is why vandalism is ILLEGAL, but your previous comments were completely dismissive of this!

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Seriously, this is like Basic Empathy and Human Emotions 101. Imagine yourself seeing the n-word written several times around your city. Contemplate the anger that you would feel, the desire for someone to do something about it, the realization that even if you dedicated all your free time to finding and stopping these people you probably couldn’t do it yourself. Now replace “n-word” with something someone else finds deeply offensive and imagine yourself as them. Do you STILL think graffiti is totally harmless, or justified as long as you’re vandalizing a megacorp?

> this is like Basic Empathy and Human Emotions 101.

Graffiti is prevalent in every major urban center. Yet you hate it.

Seems like you're the one who can't empathize.

> Property that is used by the public should be owned by the public.

Not sure why that follows, or how it would avoid the tragedy of the commons, or why we should act as if that’s already the case.

That all aside, how would you feel about people reclaiming public space, parks and public transportation, by blasting loud music in there?

> It’s always a struggle for me to accept that many people actually like graffiti.

It's a struggle for everyone to accept different perspectives on art and aesthetics, but we need to accept that others' perspectives exist and are as legitimate as our own.

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