The Graffiti Question
17 comments
·December 15, 2025mmooss
secretsatan
Graffiti is often framed at taking back the space. I think i’m rather lucky to live in a place where advertising seems somewhat more limited, with considerable space given to more local events, although i do have a giant billboard outside my flat.
There’s also a lot of space given over to graffiti, some more industrial spaces have completely embraced it, with whole lengths of walls and buildings allowing it. sharing with communal spaces such as as music venues and skate parks.
I think every underpass is also allowed, and fresh work appears every so often.
All the street furniture throughout the city, electrical boxes etc, are all uniquely decorated and it still cheers me when i see a new one.
politelemon
Not property rights, regulation. Advertising is limited to regulated areas. Graffiti is not. The comparison is well intentioned or meant to be thought provoking, and has some validity, but isn't the same thing.
margalabargala
The distinction breaks down in places where the "regulated areas" are "wherever a private property chooses to put an ad". Which is more or less the case in large parts of the US.
bondarchuk
Exactly. If "it's ugly and I don't want to see it" is ostensibly a valid argument, there's a much better target to aim for first. And easier to enforce, too.
mc32
People wouldn’t mind graffiti if the space was paid for like advertisers do. What people don’t like is people altering either public or private property unilaterally.
throwuxiytayq
Oh I fully agree with you. I'd get rid of it all if it was up to me.
Let's be honest: most graffiti we see every day is not art made in good faith. It's vandalism. And I'm not absolutist about it: I can appreciate a beautiful urban painting, just not when it's on the wall to someone's house or shop. Usually a few rude words scribbled in an emotional outburst, or - contrary to the article's point - somebody's literal signature. It's ugly, and its point is to annoy you, or at least annoy someone.
At the same time, billboards and advertisements are a cancerous growth that we don't have the courage to excise. And where we do, such as in protected historic areas, the landscape becomes beautifully transformed. I guess most people don't care, they just eat it up and accept the reality as it is - or rather, as it is forcefully pushed down their throats by corporations and aesthetically bankrupt business owners.
nephihaha
I've seen some graffiti I've really admired, but for every decent piece there are at least twenty which are just crap. "Every graffiti artist is a superhero." and "all graffiti is art" are questionable statements (the latter depends on how you define art).
Most of the graffiti I see around is some garbage about football (soccer) clubs or someone's tag/signature. That stuff isn't usually entertaining or very artistic. It's usually monochrome.
There is a very basic reason that graffiti tends to be in the city. It is where most people live and people don't usually go out into the countryside with hundreds of spray cans.
mmooss
There's lots of bad 'fine' art too. Though I wish more street art would take more advantage of the opportunity and express something.
Puts
To anyone here who expresses harsh feelings towards graffiti — here is a picture of the Berlin Wall:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall#/media/File%3ABerl...
Guess which side is which. :-) I know what side I would have rather lived on at least.
socalgal2
> Every graffiti artist is a superhero.
No, every Graffiti artist is a vandal. If you disagree, give me your address, I'll be happy to graffiti your car, your house, your TV, and your laptop and be a superhero!. If you don't like that you're a hypocrite!
I always wish I had the guts to go into a museum showing off a graffiti artist's graffiti and graffiti it.
Note: that's a separate question from whether or not the person is a talented artist.
smallnix
Well, I wouldn't love Batman in my apartment either.
chrismcb
"Their work is, by nature, uncredited." Uhm... Most graffiti is actually just a tag, the artist's tag. So, most graffiti is literally just the artists credit. And, by definition, they are vandals, not heroes.
diddid
My thoughts exactly. It’s all fun and games until they tag something you own.
echelon_musk
I still think graffiti is cool, but my enthusiasm has waned as I've aged.
Not a chance I'm going to read this insanely long essay.
As I grew up I read Subway Art, Spraycan Art and watched Style Wars. Played Jet Set Radio and Marc Ecko's Getting Up. As well as watching whatever AEROHOLiCS releases I could find uploaded to P2P sites.
I would photograph the graffiti whenever I went on a holiday and took SLR photos in my city.
I still get excited when I see bombed cargo trains on my commute to $DAYJOB. But sadly that rush of excitement is gone.
vslira
> It’s art that bursts the seams, demanding that the world bend to it and not the other way around, refusing to comply with the arbitrary bounds of property law—those meaningless slips of paper meant to legally confer ownership of land, buildings, bridges, trains, and anything else that might serve as the artist’s canvas.
I won’t touch on the property issue because it’s really tiresome - sometimes I wish there were working communists countries so these people could simply go there and we wouldn’t have to suffer them.
But it’s really the first part of this quote that gets me: it’s precisely the fact that graffitti is forced on us that makes me despise it so much. Imagine having to listen to anyone aspiring artist’s bad poetry when you’re on and about. It’s not much better than appreciating strangers’ music taste on the street or public transit. It’s worse than advertisement: at least ads are bland and repetitive, you can easily filter them out.
> When I see DEFUND BPD hovering above North Avenue in enormous, spray-painted letters, I don’t see the opinion of one idealistic graffiti artist; I see someone expressing an increasingly common sentiment.
There are many graffitis out there asking non-politely that refugees go back to their homeland or that certain kinds of people are not welcome. I suppose, maybe unfairly, that the author would consider these demonstrations a noisy hateful minority speaking for themselves and their little minds. That’s the positive side of living in a democracy: we shouldn’t need to trust that rogue public demostrations, due to the central limit theorem or something, converge on the public sentiment. We have elections for that.
And I don’t disagree that graffitti has artistic merit, however illegal or unpleasant to my eyes. I’m not that egocentric. I just think there are things more important than art.
windowliker
>inb4 banksy banksy banksy
banksy can fuck off
Someone on HN once pointed out that there's a lot more graffiti around: It's printed, in a typeface, well lit, scaled much larger, and pollutes the landscape far more the spraypainted kind.
People call it 'advertising'. It's someone's or some company's tag and their design, and this graffiti is all over the place in the city (and some in the country too), and nobody likes it. I've never seen advertising that I would keep there if I had a choice, and it fills cities - just imagine a city without it.
Why should the wealthy, already with enormously loud voices, get to 'graffiti' the city and kids trying to express themselves and have any voice at all get criticized and arrested? I know the literal answer is property rights. In this case, that system excludes 99.x% from any voice or public expression; the real question is about justice and public good. (It's a philosophical question to explore the issues, not a policy proposal.)