What do you think about graffiti/bombing/tagging or whatever you know it as?

I know that part of my job involves removing graffiti from the phone boxes I service.
Often it is gang related. Sometimes it is just a name. It is commonly…common.
When we go into neighborhoods that are known for gang activity, we are aware that our removing said graffiti can make certain elements mad. I haven’t had any trouble yet, but it is a source of stress.

@filmfann , fair enough. Did you watch the documentary, and do you feel the same way about it when it was how it was back then?

I don’t know much about graffiti, but I’m following this thread because I’m writing a story that has a minor character who happens to be a “tagging” artist. Hope you don’t mind. Good question!

I see both sides. I like for people to express themselves, as long as it’s an actual attempt at art and not just “reppin’ your set” lol. But I also feel there’s institutes and schools where people could be creative and have the chance to turn it into a career or professional hobby.

Some of the artwork is amazing.
I would not want anyone painting on my property.

@Carly I don’t mind at all :]
@blackberry, I feel mostly the same in the sense that on one hand, I think that some people are ridiculously talented- and can produce amazing pieces of artwork, I think it’s even more impressive that its often done in the dark in a fairly quick amount of time, or few times- sort of undetected. Im not overly impressed by the quick name scribbles…And on the other hand I feel kind of ehhh about it being done on the side of a business or something. ...

regardless. lots of times. the talent blows my mind.

I haven’t seen the documentary you reference but I’d like to.

I wish that every city where graffiti reigns would follow the example of Philadelphia.

Back in 1984 and continuing to present there is an active program to channel graffiti artists into expressing themselves in better ways. Originally, there was one director, jane Golden supervising mostly convicted taggers but nowadays its quite actively involving a variety of artists

The result is a city full of gorgeous large murals (some of which provide a bright spot in many of the crappiest and forlorn areas of the city as well as some of the most affluent)

Check it out.

www.muralarts.org

One of the links takes a virtual tour of some of the best from the hundreds scattered throughout the city.

As much as I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to look on it as art. Some of the work would be wonderful as murals somewhere for school building or downtown shopping malls but not the freeways, not on the sides of business owner’s buildings, not on the walls of my neighborhood.

NIMBY~

It’s my understanding that most of it is marking a gang territory, and that is strictly unacceptable.

I don’t see why people who want to present art to the rest of us have the right to do it on property that doesn’t belong to them. Some of the most beautiful graffiti I have ever seen was done by the owner of a house in Santa Barbara, who covered the entire outside and inside of his house with “folk art”.

@Buttonstc , I’ve looked at two murals . and already . oh my god. unreal. thank you for that :] I think you will really enjoy that documentary, and I agree – this is a great way to capture the talent in a productive way. ...

everyone should check out the link @Buttonstc provided!

I agree with @lucillelucillelucille.

Great stuff, artists. If it’s on your own property.

Except for the gang shiat, which has no redeeming value.

I had a little contest with gang bangers once. They were tagging the wall across the street from my place. I painted it over. They tagged it again. I painted again.After about three rounds they gave up.

Anybody planning a visit to Philly should sign up for one of several organized tours of some of the best ones.

Many people are unaware of this option and focus only on the small historic area around the Liberty Bell.

But IMHO the murals are even more impressive when viewed in person. Some are really huge and beautiful.

I used to go out of my way a little to view certain of my favorites when driving to and fro in the years when I lived there.

It was also great watching the progress of a new one being painted.

you definitly got my interest, I have a list of things I’d like to do and this is now one of them.

The culture is pretty beautiful in my opinion as well. There’s a certain street cred that one can gain, with the right style. That style can translate into heading in the real world realm and getting paid. I don’t like how gang wangsters try and tag territory, that’s pretty dumb in my opinion because it holds a society back. Artists that do it to promote thinking, thats good grafitti. Most grafitti artists I know are paid by now though, so it’s hard to come up. You have to be so legit and clean now a days. Technique has to be spot on and distinct, otherwise youre just biting and thats not cool. I think street art is equivalent to what country music is to mid westerners. Just that, city kids grow up in street art.

Some of it is cool, and a lot of it is indecipherable gang bullshit or just shitty or cliche’ art on its own.

I’m interested in the type of graffiti that obviously takes talent, but I’d be pissed if someone tagged any of my property, talented or not.

People who do graffiti are not artist. They are criminals and sad losers that damage public and private property to get their own personal jollies. They tag our garage door in San Francisco several times a year. The city will fine us if we don’t remove the graffiti right away because the cable cars loaded with tourists regularly go right past our place.

When I see graffiti, I don’t see art. I just visualize the little lost losers that creep around in the night.

@gondwanalon Sorry to hear that. But SF is the hub of true artist that do graffiti. I’m an artist and I detest those that tag on private property. That’s not cool at all. Those are mostly just uneducated artists with no grasp of respect.

@EVERYONE Graffiti artists that have respect are tight. The ones that use it for banging, thats bs. Graffiti was like hip hop. It started off as a positive message and served as the only forum for street artists. Now it’s plagued by swag, and the self as an entity, but if they were tight in the first place, they wouldn’t really need to tag their name all over the damn place. Look up Bansky, Fairey.

It gives me something to do while stopped at a RR crossing, gandering at all those rail cars clanking by. Some of it is pretty good and some is done by no talent wanna be’s.

@dreamwolf Banksy is alright, but Shep Fairey is a pretentious douchecanoe plagiarist.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard Hah, give me one example of how Fairey is pretentious, and a plagiarist?

@dreamwolf pretentiousness isn’t exactly quantifiable, but it is how I perceive him. There are numerous examples of him plagiarizing the works of others. While there is some debate about what constitutes plagiarism within Fairey’s contexts, some of the similarities between his works and the works of others are pretty damn glaring.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard You know, I didn’t understand the rules of copyright in regards to artist works. If he were making money off those murals and he used someones works. He is obliged to either have contact with the artist prior to posting, with a settled agreement whether publicly known or privately known, that has to do with money. Or he has selected pieces from works that are no longer backed by copyright. Remember, copyright, are works protected by the U.S. government for a certain amount of time. And there’s the saying, if a work is changed 70 percent, it becomes an original piece, that is in the art world and most artists acknowledge that. I personally am not into references what others have done, I feel people should kick it from their head. But even Mona Lisa was drawn from a photograph. Everything is a copy.

Mona Lisa was drawn from a photograph?

I didn’t know that cameras were present in the Renaissance era ~

@Buttonstc Well now you do.

@Buttonstc It was called the Camera Obscura. Back in the day, if you were an artist who was anyone, you knew someone who ran the Camera Obscura, then the still life was created from there.

Some of it is cool, done by genuinely talented “artists”, just don’t piss in my yard.
Most of it around these parts is of crudely drawn cocks & hastily scribbled profanities by the “look at me, i’ve written something where it’s not allowed, aren’t I hard” crowd.

An image projected onto a wall, canvas, or piece of paper and subsequently traced can hardly be accurately referred to as a photograph in the way it is understood today.

I’m familiar with camera obscura and while it is a technique which was a precursor leading to the developmint of cameras capable of creating photos, camera obscura itself created images. Images are not photographs. Photographs are tangible prints (not tracings) which can be held in one’s hands and passed on through time.

Unless these images from camera obscura were manually traced onto something tangible, in and of themselves, they would vanish with the passing of the light source.

A tracing does not equal a photograph. Yes, the root word descriptions are related but that doesn’t automatically make them equal.

So, for the sake of strictest accuracy, I guess I will rephrase my initial observation.

The Mona Lisa was copied (traced) from a projected image, not from a photograph (in it’s common understanding of being from the tangible medium of photographic film)

@boxer3 Thank you for posting the link to Style Wars. It was particularly interesting for me because I lived in NYC about 10 years after this documentary was made, and by then the subways were always perfectly clean – during the 3.5 years I lived there, I only saw a graffiti-covered subway car once. Since they were unable to mark up the outside of the cars, they had taken to scratching the windows up. Although I’m totally down with street art, scratching your name on a window is just stupid.

@FutureMemory , you’re welcome :]
That’s actually really sad that there were no traces left whatsoever,

though I do agree scratching the windows is not really “talent”
I imagine it was kind of a big F you to the people who cleaned
their pieces off of the cars.

@dreamwolf , banksy and fairey are geat- I had some great books with abunch of banksy’s work when I was in highschool

I personally love graffiti when it’s either done well, or has a meaning behind it (or both). It’s harder to respect when it’s just someone who decided that they wanted to see their name scribbled on the side of a building though.

In general I think graffiti is a good way to get your point across. If you’re serious about your message and think people need to see it and at least spend a second of their lives considering it, putting your art in a gallery isn’t going to do anything – the only people who are going to see it are the people who want to see it in the first place – you’re just preaching to the choir.