Why Nobody Graffiti On Art

In a certain part of San Diego, they have painted all of the green power transformers on the side of the road very artfully with flower designs. This has stopped the locals from painting graffiti on them.

People appear to respect art. Alternately, a blank surface cries out to be decorated. Solution: have non-blank surfaces.

In LosAngeles, on the 405 freeway near LAX, a mural for the LA Marathon was done which had remained graffiti-free for years. Had remained graffiti-free. Now, it's tagged up just like everything else. Give the taggers time; as soon as the first transformer gets tagged, they're all gonna get tagged.

"There's also another one on the 10 freeway close to the 405. The problem was that it wasn't ever kept up. When the mural starts deteriorating it becomes evident that no one really cares about it and then it's wide open to graffiti. Fortunately wiki isn't affected by that problem, if people lose track of a page and don't keep it clean then there's no incentive for people to mess with it because nobody will care if it gets messed with which essentially defeats the purpose."

An argument can be made that graffiti is art. The counter-argument is that graffiti is what urban humans do instead of pissing on tree stumps, but on the other hand, it could be that most things humans do are analogous to pissing on tree stumps.

Some graffiti is art. Most of it is communication. This is kind of like a wiki, actually.

The real artists are few - you know them when you see their work, but that's a rare thing. The rest of them are either looking for some puddin' tang or they're making sure their stench is well-known and ... somehow ... 'respected'. The latter's communication is, "This territory is mine and these are my boyz," so it's just pissing on tree-stumps.

The above description applies equally well to public graffiti and museum art.

I've stenciled a lot of sidewalks, and been caught, too - but nobody objects to rosebuds painted on streetcorners. Like gang taggers and everyone here, I wanted to leave a mark.

There was a TelevisionAd? here (Israel) a year ago or so. There was a kid that bribed the guard in a museum and then drew a mustache on the MonaLisa?. (Preceded by Marcel Duchamp in 1919 - L.H.O.O.Q.!

If you care about enforcement, keep your property under surveillance. In fact, keep your property under surveillance anyway. It puts you in a position of power.

Or, "Keep everything under lockdown, we will all feel safer."

Why do we want that sort of power, again? Seems to me a hassle with no real benefits.

Reading this page reminded me of an article that I had read recently. While it was for programmers you could also say that it was about urban decay and the way that we can deal with it. I would bet that the power transformers' artwork was in disrepair when the Tagging started again.

The link (warning it is written by and for programmers)

http://www.artima.com/intv/fixit.html

Many Renaissance buildings in Italy contain pieces of rock ripped from classical ones. I think most would consider both art. Which has more right to exist?

Graffiti is just art created on top of other art. If someone painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa, would the resultant painting be better or worse than it's predecessor?

It's all a matter of subjective personal opinion. Scientists have yet to reach widespread consensus on an algorithm for producing the best art.

Wikis are the same.

It could be argued that wikis work because of information Darwinism. The "fittest" ideas survive, while those no one likes die off.

Wiki idea fitness is determined by the relative stubbornness of the proponents and opponents. One person can protect or delete an idea regardless of what anyone else thinks.

I don't think that 'Darwinism' is the correct term for it. An idea that could be a very 'fit' one could piss off a number of users and be deleted, whereas and one that is 'unfit' and pleases a number of users could end up with numerous defenders no matter how poorly thought it is. Sorta like how people get elected to office.

I think that this implies "fitness" on a wiki is pleasing a number of users. Evolutionarily successful animals are not "better" than the others they are "better at reproducing". Evolution does not imply improvement.

See FixBrokenWindows

I lived at a co-op house when I went to college that was four storeys of murals. People unfortunately graffiti'd on them all the time.

http://barringtonhall.org ( BrokenLink )

However, this was responsible for the fact that I had a summer job there fixing the paintings on the walls. It was the easiest job I ever had in my life and I got room and board a whole summer for it.

This discussion reminds me of what happened to the paintings on the Berlin wall after it fell. Some of the paintings were well-known (like the kiss between Khruschev and the East-German president, or the Trabant driving through the wall).

After the wall "fell", some of those bits remained standing, of course (I guess they're still there). Then, new graffiti appeared on it (some nice, some ugly - mostly ugly). There were people who said the painting belonged to history and should have been protected, and there were others who said that graffiti was the normal evolution for this wall after 1989, and therefore this graffiti was part of history too.

There was also the idea that this wall had been and was still a tool for everybody to use, to express themselves, and why should we change that.

I think it is important to keep the distinction between graffiti as "art" vs graffiti as "communication" in perspective. Graffiti artists have been known to create truly beautiful expressions of their world, but tagging a wall as way to communicate that intruders to one's neighborhood/block/city will meet a violent end goes against all the good things that art is supposed to bring to humanity.

Such marks are not about expression, or even political freedoms, such as a compelling political cartoon might be. They are about raw territoriality, plain and simple, no different than a tiger urinating on a tree.

In one of the above paragraphs, a contributor mentioned a freeway mural that went for months before it was tagged, Thereafter, it soon became covered with graffiti. The fact that one person's mark incited such a quick response from others indicates that it was all about territory- not expression or art. It shows that (whatever the local cultural/political situation was) some person was not willing to let some other person's mark persist on that spot without being challenged.