I can kinda empathize since I'll have an addiction to getting the perfect photograph during a protest or whatever and will go to extreme lengths and burn through SD cards to get it.
In my experience the majority of graffiti is artists just putting up art. Privileged folk pass down the propaganda that graffiti is dirty and gangster and so any street art is viewed as dirty, but in the end it's just a matter of taste.
> "Borderline demonic"
> look inside
> it's Calvin and hobbesDemons aren't real so I don't understand what this means.
> tasteless disgusting mess
Do you disagree that taste is subjective, then? It seems what's happening here is that you're very, very confident that you are an authority on what's beautiful, despite several people telling you they find beauty in what you abhor.
But you're right that I'm very confident in my measure of what's beautiful and what's not, and a few people aren't going to sway me. Even if every last human on the earth fell for this demonic art, I wouldn't budge.
> It's the Christian version of the Dao.
So far as I can tell, this isn't a thing that actually exists, but you refer to it as "the," meaning that to you, it's an objectively existing thing that we should all recognize.
Alongside that:
> The type of art you like or dislike is a reflection of your mental state
No, this is not objectively true in the way you seem to be implying.
> some of those mental states are good and some are evil, which is objective
No, practically by definition, "good" and "evil" are subjective.
> Even if every last human on the earth fell for this demonic art, I wouldn't budge.
Yes, this is clear.
Out of good faith and frank honesty I tell you this: There is no purpose in conversing with you, as apparently you're only capable of lecturing people of the Verified-by-Jehovah Revealed Truth of your personal ideology.
Being incapable of overruling your base reactions is not a flex.
Art? Where I live the overwhelming majority of graffiti is just a few letters forming meaningless words... Like even if it was art, no one could appreciate it because no one could understand it.
Train graffiti allows your art to roam and writers from other cities see it and recognize it. Your creativity proceeds you when you go to other cities to write and expand where you're known.
I live in a large metro and see very little if any gang graffiti. Also, most of the really good stuff? You never know its there because its under bridges, in aqua ducts and other areas few, if any people know about or venture to.
So, what are these random scribblers resisting, exactly? It's like saying that defecating on the street is a form of self-expression and "leaving their mark". Even if it is, do we really need to tolerate it?
>Not to mention, it's lovely to be connected to a common thread of humanity over literal millenia.
There is nothing lovely about seeing all this garbage littering the walls of public buildings and historical finds do not justify this behaviour.
The idea that the city is owned by the uppermost caste of that society.
> There is nothing lovely about seeing all this garbage littering the walls of public buildings and historical finds do not justify this behaviour.
Massive cathedrals to the rich would be erected and made holy, and individuals upon whose back society is build would demonstrate that though entrance is barred to them, they still can make the thing their own.
Nowadays there's plenty of such things in a city that closes its doors to many people that live in said city. San Francisco is a great example of this, where rising costs are pushing anyone not working in tech. Graffiti is an easy way to spit in the face of the rich that are trying to take a city away from you. Clearly, it has an outsized impact on their sensibilities.
There's plenty of graffiti in Manhattan, have you looked up how much it costs to rent there lately?
Nope, not something I thought up at all, this is what I discovered after talking to a lot of taggers and street artists as a result of my photography obsession leading me into the skater scene. I used to think tagging was just gangs marking territory (in reality only a small portion of it is).
What I have noticed is that a certain class of people have formed an immutable idea of taggers, skaters, and street artists, and that idea includes that for whatever reason all these sorts of folks are stupid. I've found that to be not the case at all.
The people being hurt by this aren't the millionaire or billionaire tech caste.
I'm reminded of when rioters were trashing stores in response to George Floyd's death. The usual justification was "oh business insurance will cover it, they need an outlet for their emotions" Well, the only grocery store in a predominantly black neighborhood was out of commission for weeks due to damage. A black owned liquor store was burned down, and he didn't have insurance. Lots of similar stories on Lake Street. The people who deserved that harm the very least got it the most.
We whitewash crime every day here, for example theft of labor value. It's not a crime in the USA but it is a crime insomuch as it's unethical.
Me too, but it's impossible to do so in any meaningfully accurate, objective, measurable way.
Nobody has ever found a better system.
> Nobody has ever found a better system.
Anarchists in Spain did in 1936 when they syndicalized the majority of the economy. BTW Walter I'm not sure you remember but I'm fairly certain you've replied these exact words to me before.
Value is what you're willing to pay for something, and what you're willing to accept as payment.
> Even capitalist value is disconnected from market price, see the current stock market.
The value of a stock is the market price. There is no other value.
The value of a teacher is what you're willing to pay for him, and what he is willing to accept. The value of government paid teachers is not knowable, since the money to pay them is forcibly extracted.
> I'm fairly certain you've replied these exact words to me before.
I've written this many times here!
Also, the word "value" is used outside of monetary contexts. If you said "I value you" to a loved one, I doubt even an avout capitalist libertarian such as yourself would be so heartless as to put a dollar price on that "value." So no, value is not just "what you're willing to pay." That's a Chicago school of economics lie that has been allowed to determine the mechanics of neoliberal society.
In any case this isn't really a conversation if you just keep saying the same thing over and over again, "value is cost," using basically undifferentiated examples.
Unions negotiating on behalf of the mass of workers works better.
When you see an impressive sculpture or skyscraper you know a lot of resources were spent, you know the rich people here are rich. When you see an area with lots of graffiti, there may be many good or bad things about it, but you know the citizens are free.
I would hope graffitiers have respect to only draw on the mundane parts of the city, not on cool sculptures. And in my experience, that is true. Also they should not obscure windows or information signs.
No, I am not, and I haven't mentioned guns or even hinted at the topic. Do whatever you want, but trying to purposefully destroy and smear the environment around you and claim it's an expression of freedom is ridiculous. It's just malicious, disgusting behavior that helps no one, serves no cause and has nothing to do with freedom.
Have you had to clean off graffiti?
I understand that you prefer to make up your mind about street artists, but I can assure you as someone that used to hold the same opinion, that opinion is held from a place of unfamiliarity with the culture and the people in it. It was very enlightening for me to step out of my SF tech circle into the street art scene and talk to very, very different people. You may be different but I personally find it very important to challenge my thinking by talking to very different kinds of people.
Random online interactions rarely change anyone's opinions, and you don't have to accept my worldview, and neither I need to accept yours. I am just somewhat saddened that there are people who would defend defacing the city like that, but at the same time, I understand that we are byproducts of our environment. I think I should consider myself lucky that I happen to live in a place which I appreciate. It's not that I am incapable of admiring art or loathe graffiti as a style, but, at least based on my experience, most of it are just cases of vandalism. My city actually have places dedicated to graffiti artists, so that they can create whatever they want freely, but I guess that removes at least some of the fun.
Graffiti is like protesting. The government likes to contain it and deny it and suppress it. Your city probably has a free speech zone where protesting is allowed, which is far out of the way so those protests won't have an audience, but that is not where protests occur when they occur.
What a weird thing to say. I don't know whether you live in some totalitarian regime or assume that you do, but I don't. However, I can see it as means of protesting, an we can find examples of it in history and current day, but most graffiti out there is not that at all.
People not only tolerate, but I'd argue most people prefer it. I think, unlike Singapore or Tokyo, Americans, in cities, largely prefer a little lived in grime.
The Mission Bay is a relatively new neighborhood in San Francisco - mostly free of graffiti and is pretty much sterile, and most people would prefer to live in the Mission rather than Mission Bay. OpenAI likely pays a huge premium to HQ in the mission rather than settling in the more corporate offices of Mission Bay or even the Financial District.
I also noticed the same in Berlin - Kreuzberg, Neukolln, and other neighborhoods in East Berlin attract the most people, despite being drenched in graffiti.
If ever move to a city in America and tell people you live in the generally clean, spick and span, neighborhood in that city, half the people will look at you like you have 3 heads or simply assume you have no personality. Graffiti has largely become an accepted, or even valued, feature of a neighborhood. I believe internally it separates the "cool" city inhabitants from the "losers" out in the suburbs.
Edit: I just looked through all the images in the OP and one of them is a banksy. It's been there for over a decade. Graffiti isn't just tolerated, its practically protected.
I think this is the heart of it, and where cities and suburban towns differ.
It's admittedly very hard to articulate in words. The walls of buildings in a city are part of the greater, broader, "face of the city." They are in a sense both part of a general "public space" yet also still privately owned. The walls of single family homes in suburban neighborhoods don't really compare. There's much more of a shared sense of "ours" in a city than there is out in the country, where everything's fenced off in little discrete boxes of land, each with someone's name on it. This greater sense of shared agency over the aesthetic of the broader "city" makes street art more justifiable there than it is in single family home places.
It really undermines the sense of community when vandals deface public spaces and community centers and apartment blocks.
The people in these communities feel the opposite of you, especially since a lot of street art is murals capturing some local culture e.g. see Clarion Alley in San Francisco, a lot of very explicit messages of community.
City ordinance is not an accurate reflection of the desires of all subsections of a city. It's a reflection of the desires of the ruling caste, whose needs sometimes, but frequently don't, align with those of "lower" castes.
A bench is a great place for a nap, unless the mayor happens to see you sleeping on one, gets scared, and calls the cops about it.
I much prefer graffiti in my field of vision than corporate billboards. In SF I don't even notice the graffiti, maybe because most of it is hard to read and understand? But I do notice the huge huge billboards over every thoroughfare with the stupid corny messages.
Is of course what art-students, pol-sci and social-sciences majors construct out of it because it fits their narratives. Never mind that the scratching of some roman soldier in a brothel's restroom has nothing to do at all with the NYC-born graffti culture. This top-to-bottom social astro-turfing would be just laughable grandstanding if it didn't result in real consequences for less affluent kids: crime, drugs, and deadly injuries as well as filing for bankrupcy at an age where Mrs. cultural-capital has acquired her prestigous arts degree.
We were discussing graffiti.
You seem to know a lot better than less affluent people what's good for them. When you talk to such people, what do they tell you about crime, drugs, deadly injury, and filing for bankruptcy? When you've talked to graffiti artists, what led you to believe they were doing it so as to cause crime, drugs, deadly injury, and bankruptcy?
> therefore an important relief valve
no, just a way for a minority to trash public infrastructure because they're assholes
> Graffiti is a population's expression of ownership of their city.
My understanding has been (some fraction of) taggers are disaffected. So I could buy that some are reasserting ownership.
Some are just dumb teenagers acting out (shitposting), like my son did.
A handful are pretty good artists. Like some of the kids in my kid's extended social group. Worthy of resources and media. eg Commissions for murals.
There can be beautiful and effective expressions of culture and resistance that don’t tear down the commons people are trying to build together. And it’s hard to ask people to take care of the commons when other people aren’t. Instead we cede management of shared space to private enterprise (malls and gyms and retail as entertainment because your parks are torn up).
https://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/
Graffiti is a population's expression of ownership of their city. It's a very common form of countercultural resistance and therefore an important relief valve. It's a way for anyone to express themselves on their environment. A city only has value because it's occupied by many people, and those people need to express their autonomy and quite literally "leave their mark."
Not to mention, it's lovely to be connected to a common thread of humanity over literal millenia. Just as I scrawled onto a bathroom stall in 2005 "Cameron takes it up the bum," so too did Salvius write of his friend on a wall in the House of the Citharist in the year 79, "Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this."