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The Graffiti Question

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Someone on HN once pointed out that there's a lot more graffiti around: It's printed, in a typeface, well lit, scaled much larger, and pollutes the landscape far more the spraypainted kind.

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.)

Graffiti is often framed at taking back the space. I think i’m rather lucky to live in a place where advertising seems somewhat more limited, with considerable space given to more local events, although i do have a giant billboard outside my flat.

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.

Where are you that allows it in all those places? Do you mean that it's officially allowed or that laws against it are just not enforced?

Switzerland, many towns and cities seem to allow it in certain areas, the exact legality i’m not sure of. A lot of it is very good, and i think it’s organized to some aspect, with events where they redo whole areas and have competitions.

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

Exactly. If "it's ugly and I don't want to see it" is ostensibly a valid argument, there's a much better target to aim for first. And easier to enforce, too.

This reminds me of my as-yet-unfulfilled ambition to use 4chan's ad system for a public art project of some sort. The price/reach ratio seems pretty reasonable, and you pretty much know where your banner ads are going to end up (on the asshole of the internet).

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.

Not property rights, regulation. Advertising is limited to regulated areas. Graffiti is not. The comparison is well intentioned or meant to be thought provoking, and has some validity, but isn't the same thing.

The distinction breaks down in places where the "regulated areas" are "wherever a private property chooses to put an ad". Which is more or less the case in large parts of the US.

That's a difference, but in most places street art is allowed nowhere, effectively, especially compared to advertising.

People wouldn’t mind graffiti if the space was paid for like advertisers do. What people don’t like is people altering either public or private property unilaterally.

I meant to address that when I wrote about property rights: Only the wealthy can afford what you describe; that system effectively restricts such expression to them.

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.)

Is it unilateral? Aren't there unwritten (or maybe even written) rules about who gets to tag where, how long it gets to stay up, etc.? You don't hear much about territory beefs these days, so I would think that some sort of agreement or code of conduct reigns in most areas, in order to prevent conflict.

Fun fact: Berlin drastically limited what the "advertising" space on public transit (notably stations) can be used for. IIUC, it can only be used now for cultural events and public announcements, no products of any kind.

Obligatory mention of Sap Paulo here ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

Very interesting! What are the rules for businesses putting their own names on their stores?

> just imagine a city without it

Havana

Oh I fully agree with you. I'd get rid of it all if it was up to me.

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.

> on the wall to someone's house or shop

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.

I've seen some graffiti I've really admired, but for every decent piece there are at least twenty which are just crap. "Every graffiti artist is a superhero." and "all graffiti is art" are questionable statements (the latter depends on how you define art).

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.

There's lots of bad 'fine' art too. Though I wish more street art would take more advantage of the opportunity and express something.

> Every graffiti artist is a superhero.

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.

You wouldn’t though. And that’s part of the allure. Someone doing something transgressive that the rest of us wouldn’t, and (sometimes) making something beautiful. I certainly wouldn’t give the label superhero. But it can be interesting.

Well, I wouldn't love Batman in my apartment either.

To anyone here who expresses harsh feelings towards graffiti — here is a picture of the Berlin Wall:

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.

Pretty certain, that if you would have lived in West-Berlin at that time you would have chosen any place over living next to that wall. The reason the western side of the wall is covered in graffiti, is because all areas next to it were considered a dump.

I was a graffiti „artist“ for 15 years and it almost ruined my life. The people, the physical danger and of course the large claims against me for property damages. Over the course of my „career“ I of course came across the same theories the author presents and I can wholeheartedly say with confidence that it is all naive garbage. If you think that some Roman scratching something into a bench 500 BC has anything in common with a teenager spraypainting a subway car, high on drugs, at risk of getting disfigured by an approaching train or getting fried by thousands of volts I lose all respect for you. This graffiti-romantization is usually done by bystanders, and almost always by upper class people. Yeah, you can feel all edgy and stuff about your views, but it has real consequences for kids from those parts of societies that can’t get a lawyer to bail them out. Kids die from this, let alone exposing them to all sorts of hazardous lifestyles.

"Their work is, by nature, uncredited." Uhm... Most graffiti is actually just a tag, the artist's tag. So, most graffiti is literally just the artists credit. And, by definition, they are vandals, not heroes.

How is that the definition of vandalism? I think that depends on intent and on the result, which is subjective.

My thoughts exactly. It’s all fun and games until they tag something you own.

I still think graffiti is cool, but my enthusiasm has waned as I've aged.

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.

> It’s art that bursts the seams, demanding that the world bend to it and not the other way around, refusing to comply with the arbitrary bounds of property law—those meaningless slips of paper meant to legally confer ownership of land, buildings, bridges, trains, and anything else that might serve as the artist’s canvas.

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.

Property rights are not absolute (except when powerful people have property and want somethign).

> 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? ???

> This seems like a no-brainer, but there are people out there who truly believe that the vandalistic nature of graffiti negates any possible artistic merit. Though my appreciation for graffiti is not unconditional, I tend to take the opposite stance: graffiti’s transgressive qualities only enhance its aesthetic value. It’s art that bursts the seams, demanding that the world bend to it and not the other way around, refusing to comply with the arbitrary bounds of property law—those meaningless slips of paper meant to legally confer ownership of land, buildings, bridges, trains, and anything else that might serve as the artist’s canvas.

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.

>inb4 banksy banksy banksy

banksy can fuck off

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