Nearly all of these look like murals, not graffiti (these are distinct forms of street art). Regardless, those photos are beautiful and I'd love to have those instead of billboards in my city.
Can you elaborate on this? I've always thought a mural was just a type of graffiti?
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...
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...
What about something like this https://maps.app.goo.gl/oCbe2DZW1vqyXJ2h9?g_st=ic
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.
[1]: https://media1.westword.com/den/imager/u/magnum/17103041/ima...
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.
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...
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(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)
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.
I studied art in university, am an artist myself, and visit major exhibitions around the world on a regular basis. Much graffiti is indeed valid art.
"I studied art in university, am an artist myself" Garbage argument. Universities sell debt and false authority badges, not knowledge. And of course it never crossed your mind that I might be an artist myself. No, it didn't. It very obviously didn't.
Usually artists also don’t police and get so angry about other people’s self expression.
Why? I would assume "what is art?" is a subject on which much time is spent in art school.
The NYC gallery scene started bestowing art-ness upon people who became known for the work they painted on the city's walls around... exactly forty years ago, I looked up Kieth Haring as a random example and galleries started showing his work in 1983.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. :)
I'd liken it more to the works of Henri Rousseau or even maybe the French Decadent movement.
Cities adding art back onto the walls, is probably closer to how the ancient Greek cities actually looked. Our classical architectural view of pristine white walls is wrong. https://exploringgreece.tv/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/parthe...
Obviously ancient status were colored but probably in a much nicer way. No way something like:
https://static.frieze.com/files/inline-images/web-cg-h-102-a...
could be even close to the original ( considering that the Romans generally managed to somehow get skin tones more or less right in the few paintings that survived)
Particularly in this example: https://static.frieze.com/files/inline-images/web-cg-h-102-a...
The bright clothes are fine, but his skin is awful. It's flat and lifeless, like a cold corpse drained of blood. It looks like they put the primer coat on then left it unfinished; I think that's literally what they did. Maybe this look is what they were originally going for, but I don't think so. Look at the detail on that guy's knees, they look just like real knees. I don't believe the original artists went through so much trouble to sculpt hyper-realistic knees then let some intern half-ass the paint job.
I think the reproductions suffer a bit because the distance these statues were from a viewer varied -- but just like murals
No, I don’t think so.
The way some of these “reconstructions” look is just plain awful. And based on the surviving examples of frescoes and paintings they would look as just awful the the Romans.
> I think the reproductions suffer a bit because
They suffer because there is no shading for one thing. The skin and hair especially just look awful. It has nothing to do with the bright colors (I get that part).
And I would actually claim that most Warhol is trash, good swaths of Dali worthless, and both Matisse and Gaugin mixed bags.
The difference is that pieces of art can be bad, but you’re going to have to do a lot more work to dismiss an entire set of categories of art. Even the examples of Warhol, Dali, etc. are individual artists, not an entire medium.
Imagine arguing that there are exactly zero good pieces of software written in JavaScript bc JavaScript is a bad language.
Graffiti started showing up in art galleries 30-40 years ago.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rare-banksy-solo-e...
They also reflect the sensibilities and thoughts of the artist in relation to the city and its inhabitants. I love em' :)
I genuinely don't know if you're trolling, or actually believe what you wrote? If the latter, I'd love to hear more. I vehemently disagree with everything you said but that's no reason to downvote - we learn more from opposing viewpoints, especially if new and hard to comprehend.
Also, comic books are art as well. Sequential art has been recognised by everyone with an ounce of heart and one of the main mediums for storytelling. Some even been calling it the ninth art just like cinema is the seventh. It is a medium unlike painting, cinema, or photography, one in which you can do things you can't in any other medium.
I recommend checking out the following books if you want to move past your misconceptions:
- The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin. - Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud. - Comics and Sequential Art, Will Eisner.
All those books are quite approachable and engaging reads.
Maybe tone it down a bit and be nicer? Even if they have a poor education, why would you publicly shame them for it?
You said "Real art is deep, meaningful, timeless and doesn't need to be imposed."
Sand Mandalas are deeply meaningful, but completely timeless - most are created to be destroyed, often within days or hours of completion. Brueghel's Flatterers is a relatively crass, surface level, but lasting commentary on what we often refer to as Musk fanboys and such these days :P
Fundamentally, art is human expression, and your attempts to gatekeep that have fallen pretty flat so far.
Duchamp stole his signature artwork from Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven:
a 1917 letter Duchamp wrote to his sister, Susanne, translated: “One of my female friends who had adopted the masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.”
R Mutt was identified as an artist living in Philadelphia, which is where she was living at the time.
Duchamp said he had purchased the urinal from JL Mott Ironworks Company, adapting Mutt from Mott, but the company did not manufacture the model in the photograph
the handwriting on the urinal matches the handwriting Von Freytag-Loringhoven used for her poems.
Second, I never mentioned that urinal. I mentioned two artists that had intentionality and process tied to their work. Duchamp is not just that urinal, please check his other work and the movements he was associated with to learn a bit more about what mechanisms gives the art piece and aura of art. In my opinion, that understanding is quite essential to appreciate certain movements such as Dadaism.
Also, I never mentioned anything about "artists" and stealing.
All I did was name check two very well-known artists whose work is part of a larger artistic revolution, one that precipitated a discussion and a new understanding about "what is art".
I also offered some book references so that instead of accepting my opinion, the OP or anyone else can go read and form their own opinion. Because instead of being an expert, I gave references to the experts.
As usual, gotta trust an engineer to arrive full of opinions and misconceptions about a field that they're clearly not well versed and attempt to put someone down.
Your choice to smush intent and Duchamp is weird.
What intent is in a stolen piece of work presented fraudulently throughout Duchamp's life as his own, and still widely treated as iconic and used as an example of a movement. What value the criticism built upon a lie? There is plenty of unintentional art in this story!
It's funny to see someone wax pretentious about standards in art when they obviously haven't heard of, say, Diego Rivera, and don't know that Haring's heyday was "30 to 40 years ago".
You should have kept your mouth shut instead of embarrassing yourself.
https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/mural_re...
By that I mean cops of course (73% joking)
I'm not sure if there are murals in the richest neighborhoods (Pacific Heights) or the less dense, more suburban neighborhoods (Sunset, Richmond), but there are murals throughout the dense neighborhoods near downtown. (SOMA, the Mission, Haight, etc.)
Just because the suburbs don’t have murals doesn’t mean that urban areas that do are dangerous.
Palo Alto has street murals scattered around the city in commercial districts and some private homes.
It's two things in the US. It's ghettos, as you say. But more and more it's whites who want to signal that they're "cool" with minority culture, and you see them in economically well off areas.
Really recommend watching the documentary PIXO, you can find the full doc in YouTube with english subtitles.
[edit: suggesting the documentary]
It is most certainly not. This romanticizing of criminals and vandals is not any kind of compassion. Who would like their neighborhood or home turned into a hell scape?
Would you like to look at only buildings and every surface around you looking like the picture above and worse for hours every day for your commute. Because that is the reality for millions of people. Desolation and decay might be a cool photo for traveling hackers to put on their Instagram, but I think it is different when you have to live in it.
I have never heard anybody from São Paulo talk about the delights of this grafitti covering the whole city. I guess they're just uncultured?
The only gang graffiti you’ll see in São Paulo are written in plain letters or numbers (“PCC” or 1533), nothing like Pixo.
Indeed. Most of the markings are low-effort territory marking. At least they aren't peeing on walls.
Maybe if we added arts to the basic school curriculum some aesthetic sensitivity could be imparted in them so they'd feel pressed to better consider what they are going to paint.
We have murals and billboards in our town. The mutual started showing up in force with the rise of instagram.
https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2018/09/15/anuncio...
And good art makes people come inside. Not advertisement indeed.
Some ads are artistically very good and only the context causes us to react negatively, we don't appreciate it fully because we know it is here to influence us.
It is the same idea with graffiti. Some of it is really good, but we won't appreciate it if we tie it to vandalism and criminality.
You have said what you think isn’t valid or good and seeing something you value would be interesting.
In other words, they're propaganda. At least in the case of graffiti with social commentary, anybody can go out there and put their message up. Murals with social messages are propaganda sanctioned by the property owner, or even commissioned by the government, making it establishmentarian propaganda that pretends to be transgression by adopting the superficial form of unsanctioned graffiti. Such murals are tacky and inauthentic; scrawled gang signs have more soul.
Might as well cancel the law and put up Wal-mart signs.
This may be a case where you spend so much time trying to be contrarian and not asking "Would getting what I want actually improve anything in the world".
I think a mural could be part of a propaganda campaign, but I don't think by themselves they merit the categorization.
Graffiti is individual speech, murals commissioned by the local government to glorify itself are not.
.. we probably can't, it is too easy to automate it, and too hard to prevent that. But would be fun.
I tried to convince the person in charge of our advertising that we should include such a chat applet in one of our banner ads, which would put everyone currently viewing the banner into an anonymous chatroom. Unfortunately he wouldn't go for it.
Does anyone remember this? It has to have been 20 years ago at this point (yikes!)
https://www.google.com/search?q=valparaiso+chile+street+art&...
From my own travels, one city I would submit as a candidate would be Bangkok. In fact, I control-F'd Bangkok and no one has mentioned it yet.
As soon as you leave Savarnabhumi Airport, you are bombarded with maybe 15 to 20 billboards within just a few metres from each other, back to back. It was truly a wild thing to experience at first. All the billboards had the same ad, too.
Truly a thing to behold.
Of course art can take the place of billboards, but clearly that's not what this article aims to convey.
Stores also cannot use their full façade for advertising. Branding colors and details are OK, but logos cannot be too large (don't know the exact rule). The law is picky.
Some stores cheat by having a glass façade, and using LEDs inside that glass. Like this: https://imgur.com/a/CLdUD1C
Since this law was adopted, there's been an increase in full building graffiti, which is not banned. Now 10 years later, it is more likely to see one of these nowadays than an empty outdoor frame https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sao+paulo+full+buil...