While dated, and maybe containing some problematic takes, the book Bomb the Suburbs is worth a read.

I am 100% for graffiti, and I used to paint fairly heavy back when I lived in the city and suburbs. I only draw a hard line at cultural heritage sites that are publicly owned. Idgaf if a building or work of art is historic and it’s not in the hands of the people, hit that shit.

As a personal rule if a single prole will eat the cost of removal, I’d avoid it. No vehicles unless they’re rich people vehicles or commercial vehicles, no homes unless they’re rental properties or rich people homes, you get the picture. Like I said, that’s kind of a personal rule, and I don’t really care if other people paint personal property, because fuck your stuff.

Just tagging to me is stupid selfish egotism.

If you’re going to take the risk why not scrawl a subversive message?

Graffiti is an amazing tool for public conversation, a forum for grievances. I’d love to see more of it and get a jolt of joy when there’s good radical stuff in highly trafficked areas. Lets us know we’re many and not crazy.

We’re barraged by predatory advertising to such a depressingly saturated degree almost everywhere we look (unless you train yourself to avert your eyes, which is a good thing to practice and learn). Defacing ads is highly noble too.

Suggestion: carry a Magnum Sharpie with you everywhere so you can at least scrawl short subversive messages.

there’s a public art mural on the side of a wall i walk passed. it’s the side of a grocery store, so it would otherwise be an undifferentiated masonry wall. anyway, a year ago the community funded some regional artist to make this cool piece that fills the wall.

a few weeks ago some bozo had scrawled some b.s. like “FUCK MIKE” on it with some scratch symbols. extremely low effort in a visible part of it. thankfully the original artist knew their material, so a community member was out there scrubbing with other materials and equipment the next day and it all came off. but when first i saw it, i thought it was wrecked.

i evaluate graffiti like any other art. if it’s lame, it sucks and the artist can go fuck. and if they’re gonna tag everything we see, they should expect to eventually get tagged. if i saw somebody scrawling FUCK MIKE on some community art, i wouldn’t be mad about someone coming up and shoving them off it and tell them to get lost. we share that, so if they’re not going to put in the effort to improve or make original art, they’re bullshit and they can take their FUCK MIKE opus to some bathroom stall where it belongs.

if you’re going to go over someone else’s art with your own art, it better be good. and if you’re gonna be nearly-permanently marking up the place we all share, better expect to get marked up yourself if you’re being low effort with the content.

i think all advertising is below the lowest effort graffiti. so if you want to write “FUCK MIKE” on a billboard, have at it. i’m more likely to believe the anti-mike messaging there.

I think we should be anti any tagging. Its not about protecting private property, but about having a society in which beautiful things are shared for what they are and democratic processes are used to get rid of the ugly or unecessary. If its not democratically agreed, i disagree with the tagging.

I lived in Italy for a while, and while I think graffiti can be one of the purest forms of art when it’s done without a attempt to build social clout, it doesn’t add to things when it’s done over other art. Vandalize signs. Vandalize ads. Vandalize blank walls, the sides of corporate buildings, but if something was made by actual artisans hundreds or thousands of years ago, you aren’t making it better by adding an inconsistent layer of spray paint. There are canvases everywhere that aren’t other art.

I remember the first time I went to Chicago on a train when I was a kid and, as we got closer, the train passed through these narrow buildings where people did amazing graffiti art. 🤩

I am pro-graffiti for almost everything except: nature, personal property that’s not the artist’s (unless it belongs to the rich), and other works of art and historically significant structures. Oh, and racist bs. I don’t love tags, especially lazy ones, but I’m not against them. Of course there are always exceptions but that’s generally how I feel.

Graffiti is the art of the masses. There can be no middle ground because whether it is acceptable or not is entirely determined by the culture of the area. What’s unacceptable can be fixed. What’s acceptable can be ignored.

I extend this to monuments, historic sites and other things. There are plenty of cases where vandalising a monument or “historic” site are acceptable. Nobody should be going to jail for spray painting a thatcher statue for instance, and it won’t be popular among the ignorant average masses but nobody should be going to jail for spray painting a memorial to soldiers that died in Iraq either.

Well I agree about the pyramids and stuff, and I think part of the solution is to have the cool and beautiful old buildings owned by the people and controlled by the people who live and work there. Same for neighborhoods and all urban spaces. Then they can decide on a case by case basis what works for them, how they want to make their area beautiful, what kind of art they want to allow and how to go about it and if and how to enforce their vision. And if and how tags fit in that vision.

Where I live, I like to see even simple, sloppy tags. I see it as people trying to own the spaces that should be theirs anyway. Sometimes they could be more colorful and I appreciate, when big beautiful graffiti don’t immediately get covered by quick tags all over. Also I like how illegal tags sometimes seem to force owners and city officials to pay artists to make beautiful art on their walls, because these tend to be left alone longer by taggers.

i dont mind tagging on already ugly things or ads. but tagging on the sign showing the bus schedule in a bus stop? that’s wrong.

Grafitti and vandalism are themselves acts that influence the historical record and tell us about the world. We would know much less about Roman history, culture and the cultures with which they interacted were it not for grafitti and vandalism. You say its reductive to point that out, but I don’t see how it would be. A Varangian carving “Halfdan was here” on the Hagia Sophia tells us a bunch of things, chiefly that Halfdan was here. There was a Halfdan and Halfdan was in Istanbul. From this we can learn several other things, derived just from the fact that Halfdan isn’t a Greco-Roman name. The fact that Halfdan existed in the times of slavery doesn’t really add or subtract to what we are told. And the fact that the Hagia Sophia was already really old by the he did it doesn’t change that either.

Now tagging is by itself not the most interesting art, it’s just a signature. It would indeed have been cooler if he’d made some sort of cool subversion of Greco-Roman/Christian iconography in runic form or made some in depth artwork, but that’s a separate issue.

As an urbanite: cool and good

As a rock climber: I will body slam into a crevasse with my crash pads

we should live in the places we live, and that includes art.

is the train window thing researched? i wouldn’t expect aboard-train violence to be occurring at a stop and i wouldn’t expect onlookers to have time to intervene if it did, but that could just be the places and kinds of trains i’ve ridden.

Graffiti is good, fuck the police.

Like all art forms its is subject to Sturgeon’s law, “90% of everything is shit”. But even if the art itself is bad the graffiti is still good on principle.

Why is every anti graffiti article illustrated with some version of this sinophobic photo? I’ve never been to a tourist site that didn’t have Kevin was here or similar shit scratched somewhere. Which has almost nothing to do with graffiti btw.

Also what’s great about graffiti is that writers don’t ask permission and leave their tags where ever they want.

We used to have it here. It’s all gone now. Turns out it was a small number of bad foreigners doing it. They all got cleaned out during covid. haven’t seen graffiti in years. I even found one, he was a friend! Had a spraypaint can in his backpack. He kept writing Who is kido? all over on closed shop fronts. Turns out, that was the name of his Dungeons and Dragons character. It’s the nonconsensual nature that bothers me. Who elected you city artist?