But that cost is not paid by the person creating the graffiti. The owner has a cost forced on them.

The aesthetic argument here is trying to validate a violent act. A lot of graffiti is beautiful, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay.

What violent act?

Modifying someone else's property, or public property, without consent.

This is a fascinating comment. How would you define violence?

If I smash your car, is that violence or not? What if I take care to smash your car only so much that it will still be able carry you to work and back?

What if I apply a protective coating to an unprotected wall, using my own money to supply the materials?

Same as adjusting other people's tire pressure: perfectly fine if you have explicit approval.

Definitely not violence though?

You mean like how poisoning isn't violence?

how is protecting your walls like killing you?

Not. Was this supposed to be a hard question?

not op but violence is traditionally defined as physical force to cause harm. but now there's financial violence and social media violence and here the message in the graffiti causes harm. eg die techy scum. it's not physically violent, but some think it's helpful to frame it as a non-physical violent act because of the expression of dislike for a particular community. it doesn't cause any grave harm, but everyone who walks by and sees it is affected by it.

Violence has always extended beyond pure physical force. Calling someone a slur to their face, or spitting in their food, or defacing their clothes or home (especially with hateful symbols) would be recognized as forms of violence at many times in history way before modern times. Holding someone at knife or gun point is also very clearly a violent act.

They definitely have a very hyper-capitalist definition of violence. It's sort of pathetic how much people somehow care about the property of the ruling classes that they will never own.

As opposed to people who define words written on the internet and not even directed at a specific person as "violence"?

I never said anything like that so why are you implying that I am? Nice strawman bro, I'm not crying over things people say to me on the internet. Anyone who sees a mean comment on the internet that doesn't actually threaten or incite violence as violence is just as pathetic as people who think art they don't like on a wall is violence. Can you please argue against points I actually made, thank you.

What are you referring to? I don't see that in this discussion.

I am not at all a hyper capitalist. I would even consider myself anti-capitalist.

But imposing your own preferred art on public commons is a (minor) form of violence, in any economic system. Especially when you do so with paints of questionable chemical composition, or with images/text that is likely to offend.

I would also say that doing the same thing even on your own property can be reprehensible, as long as it is visible to the public. Just because you own a house doesn't mean you should be able to make it look however you want on the outside, especially not in ways that are actively unpleasant to those of us that need to walk by it every day: we the public should have a say in how your private property looks. A most anti-capitalist position.

Think about it this way, if we all owned all public structures, then we all have equal rights to paint it just as much as you have the right to paint your own house. The graffiti artist has the right to paint it, you have the right to hate it. You have the right to paint something they hate, or paint over their stuff. Nobody should be being prosecuted by a higher power for a minor disagreement about artistic taste. Unless someone is full on painting swastika-ridden explicitly racist murals or sth of that nature, it's not violent. The only reason the ruling class wants you to think it's violent is because property is important to them as a source of power, and therefore must be god above all under this system.

No, this is completely wrong. If we own a public structure together, then neither of us has any right to change it except if we both agree to the change. You can't take individual actions on shared goods: you need a process of attaining the consensus of everyone involved (such as voting).

I wonder how you think this works in practice. Do you think the public structures we have and how they look are not just basically whatever aesthetic taste the people we elect have?

Sometimes councils put up several designs to be voted on by the public, but they will largely follow a bunch of design norms that will be whatever the architecture firms they hired think is trendy, for example.

And how many election programs even talk about artistic taste? That's not why we elect people, and making that an election point would be a distraction from real problems, so why not let society be and if people are more artistic in one area and make more public art, let them make it?

While I agree that public control of public buildings is relatively vague in modern times, it still exists to some extent. If a mayor wanted to tear down a beloved building and replaced with an ugly one (as judged by the esthetics of the public in the town), they would face significant backlash and may lose a future election based on that: people in certain places care a lot about the look of their town (and in others, only vaguely).

Even beyond electoral politics, many cities have public NGOs and other organizations that seek to shape this sort of thing from an early stage through various legal means (and sometimes even through civil disobedience, like tying themselves to a building to protect it). If they are broadly in line with the tastes of the people, they tend to thrive; if they are not, they will often die out.

And yes, in certain cities and towns, people actually like the way grafitti looks and are bothered when someone goes and whitewashes a beautifully painted wall. That's perfectly fine, and is a part of the culture and esthetics of that place (and here, destroying the art that people enjoy is an act of violence against the public and/or the artist). But it's also perfectly fine for other places to want neat walls with clean textures, and marring their beautiful walls with grafitti would be an act that goes against the public.

I concur that sounds really good. That's not how it works now though, which is why graffiti artists reclaim the space as the people that use it. Right now, the space is decided by people in power and with money. Rarely do we ever get real say about how it looks, and we never will. If we did own the public spaces and could make these decisions together, then I'd be down for that, and graffiti probably wouldn't be the same sort of subculture that it is.

We're talking about public property here. Many authorities have a 'no tolerance' approach to graffiti. Even if it looks nice, it will be removed. There is a belief that removing graffiti quickly discourages it. If graffiti artists find that their work won't last long, they may be discouraged from doing it in the first place. Aesthetics doesn't really come into it.

I dunno about the entirety of Germany, but I don't think I've ever seen graffiti removed in Berlin, and there's a ton of it. It's fine, nobody cares.

Graffiti on trains in Berlin is very quickly removed.

Haha thanks for the light chuckle as I wake up

Is it fine or public just fed up constantly removing it?

> There is a belief that removing graffiti quickly discourages it. If graffiti artists find that their work won't last long, they may be discouraged from doing it in the first place.

Ephemerality is known, understood, accepted, and even leveraged in art. I don't think this is an efficient deterrent, or even a deterrent at all.

> There is a belief that removing graffiti quickly discourages it.

It's the other way around, if it isn't quickly removed it will be encouraged: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

That's not really the other way around. That's 2 ways of stating basically the same thing.

I'll have to disagree... the goal is to stop encouragement, rather than to start discouragement - stopping acceleration is not the same as starting deceleration.

When it comes to acceleration, it's possible to define 0 acceleration. So we can define acceleration and deceleration in relation to that 0 acceleration.

What is 0 encouragement/discouragement? It's not obviously easy to define. One definition is doing nothing = 0 encouragement and 0 discouragement. By that definition, not removing graffiti (aka doing nothing) is not encouragement, it's simply doing nothing: a lack of encouragement and a lack of discouragement.

Because we haven't agreed on a definition of 0 encouragement and 0 discouragement, saying "decreasing encouragement" and "increasing discouragement" mean basically the same thing.

> By that definition, not removing graffiti (aka doing nothing) is not encouragement, [...]

"Doing nothing" results in encouragement in the broken windows theory:

  Under the broken windows theory, an ordered and clean environment, one that is maintained, sends the signal that the area is monitored and that criminal behavior is not tolerated. Conversely, a disordered environment, one that is not maintained (broken windows, graffiti, excessive litter), sends the signal that the area is not monitored and that criminal behavior has little risk of detection.

In my understanding stopping encouragement is maintenance work, while starting discouragement is social work. And by doing the (simpler) maintenance work a (costlier) social work won't be necessary.

To add a bit.. the gist of the broken windows theory is that the world (environment) evolves even without you or me. A broken window is an action demanding a reaction. If no reaction is taken, "doing nothing" will be read as the reaction. I think that's fascinating!

There's also the same analogy to refactoring in software engineering. If a project is well maintained with every incoming feature, then a big refactor epic won't be necessary.

"The stop of encouragement will prevent the start of discouragement" doesn't mean that the reverse is true ("the start of discouragement will promote the stop of encouragement"). So it isn't stating basically the same thing.

The big irony in social studies with the broken windows theory is that discouragement often feels easier to practice than maintenance to an outsider. Or, in analogy to software engineering, a one time big refactor feels easier to do than continuous maintenance, as all the work actually included in a refactor (team syncing, product without features etc.) is mostly overlooked during the development if maintenance is not well practiced.

No, the owner or rather operator (if the carriage is publicly owned) might be legally obliged to remove it just for the carriage identification to be clearly visible, the windows to be clean etc.

Nice.

I'm going to spray a can of paint on your car and explain to judge that "it's thuuuomas's problem now, since he disagrees with aesthetics of his new car color".

This has got to be the most insane comment in this thread.

“Hey, I’m going to hold a gun to your head. If you don’t give me $100 I’ll shoot you. Remember though that the cost incurred here is a choice you’re going to make if you disagree with my actions. I can’t truly force you to do anything…”