Grafitti plague in Warsaw

Okay, try this...... CONTEXT MATTERS!

If the owner consents (or pays) for it, it's not grafitti.

I'm too realistic to think that grafitti can be eliminated entirely. But ideally it's a minor aspect of the urban experience and usually disappears relatively quickly.

I even have no problem with established grafitti walls, set aside by cities for the inclined to decorate as they see fit.

I take boiling, rage-filled exception to mindless tagging and/or primitive scribbling of no merit against the will of the owners.

And the fact is that most 'taggers' are sniveling cowards targeting the property and housing of those unable to defend themselves. They don't tag multinational corporations because they know what might happen to them...

Here's art for you, tagging walls with graffiti murals. In Wroclaw the columns holding up the interchange by Most Grunwaldzki and the wall by Hala Ludowa comes to mind. You've got these awesome pieces of art, and some assclown comes by and decides to scribble over it. Yay.

More often than not those moronic scribblers are teenagers or kids, so a can of paint shoved up their ass would do just fine.

Teenagers scrawling HWDP or LEGIA KURWY isn't art. Annd 4 concrete walls may not look as impressive as York Minster, but they are nevertheless architecture, complete in themselves and the users of that architecture have a right to use it without vandalism.


Gladly. Though it's a while since I finished my degree. Art must have an intention to be art. The piece of snot I just blew out of my nose and smeared on the wall has a form and substance - but it isn't art. There must also be a level of artistic inspiration - nobody can convincingly forge a Jackson Pollock splash painting, though many have tried.It must also have some degree of craftsmanship though there is a debate on this (see Gombrich) - I could carve a sculpture - but would it be accepted as a sculpture?

Is this art?




Make the punishment fit the crime. I've always favoured making them clean it off, but the little gits would probably get high on the solvents.

Your sculpture would have to be recognized as a sculpture, it means that art have to have universal appeal.

Exactly! It's the art/craft dilemma. Grafitti is neither.

Thank you, I appreciate that and I find your lessons interesting.

mafketis, one of the most amazing things in this world is that everything has a context. Nothing exists outside of a context, maybe apart from some of the reasoning given on this forum ;) And yes, I believe that an important part of the street art is that it's an illegal activity. It matters, it gives it that power of rebellion, it gives it the meaning of resistance.


Is that your definition of art? :) It's weakish... Do you think that the painter of the picture No.1 had the intention to make art? Or was he/she just expressing whatever he/she felt like expressing? Yet, for some reason it's called art - maybe because it's a couple of thousands years older than the painting you posted...


More so.


Why not? What does it mean "to be accepted as a sculpture"? By whom? By the public? It has been proven many times that the public will accept as art anything named so by the media :(


I don't know. I don't like it as graffiti. The message of it is not readable to me. But we don't know the context - perhaps the building's owner is a vile man and the message means "You should repent!".. lol

For some reason the picture No.2 is considered art...

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Not mine, but I'm very happy to run with it.


He/she had the intention to create art. The Lascaux cave paintings aren't instruction diagrams; those handprints are there to create an impression on those who see it. Their existance so many years later intensifies that - it takes us away from the mundane. Grafitti has the opposite effect.


The observer.


So often the media criticise art for not being art. I remember well the brouhaha about Carl Andre's Bricks at the Tate Gallery. Art creates an effect on the observer. Now as for grafitti - Banksy's stuff creates an effect, it makes the observer think differently. An illegible scrawl on the side of a building (itself architecture) just irritates because it is destructive. Art can be a transformation - but can a pointless destruction be art?


The message is that damaging it with a spray can is more naughty than just spitting on it.


Now that would be interesting - if it was readable as such - but it isn't.

BTW, Your picture number 2 is art, leaving metaphorical number twos with spray paint is just destruction.

chichimera ok if every expression of emotion is art then I'll go to Warsaw spit on you, make a photo and ask you to write an article in every possible art newspaper or even Wysokie Obcasy how an incredibly artistic it was from me

:)) yeah, probably.


That one was not Lascaux, but nevermind.


well, that's an overinterpretation.


Why? I'm not being sarcastic now, I honestly don't know. Because the materials used to create it were more expensive than a can of spray? Because it's blue and the other one black and white? Because the line is straight and the other one curvy? I quite like it to be honest, I like the colours and the "silence" of it. Does my liking it make it art?

Don't get me wrong - I do get the differnce between art and vandalism, but I also realize that the border between them is not always so distinc as some people would like to see it.

Yes the difference is crystal clear. If you hooded friends spray on any space which is not their own property, that is vandalism and a crime.

It degrades the neighbourhood. It puts YOU in the same league with solvent-sniffers in the train stations, with the creeps which destroy railcars. With the creeps who destroy newly-planted flowers in the city-centre.

In short, it infects everyday civic society.

So according to you AK activists painting anchors during WWII were criminals?


:) I'm devastated...

Of course - Lascaux is very different. The oldest piece of art is much older. It was found in Derbyshire, England. It's an image of a horse - completely stylised.


That's true.

:)
And have you ever thought that all those prehistoric paintings are graffiti as well? :)


independent.co.uk/news/science/cave-paintings-are-graffiti-by-prehistoric-yobs-467773.html

So in a million years time some boffin is going to look at the cave paintings , and the graffiti in Warsaw....and decide that civilisation went backwards....

If the human kind doesn't change dramatically, they will even be preserving the graffiti in Warsaw and charging visitors for watching it

God knows what they will think of us....?

Chichimera - you have inspired me to create 'art' by going on an artistic crime spree through Wrocław - Look out for the artistic bloodstains left on the road after my car chase, the crying children looking at their artistically destroyed teddy, and the artfully destroyed town hall.

Where do you draw the line between what is acceptable and what is not in art? It may be done artistically and may even be art, but that does not make it pretty for the majority of society.

Contracted grafitti is often beautiful and in an appropriate place, but the 'plague' the OP was talking about is of little to no artistic value to the majority of people - and it is the majority of people who have to look at it and clean up after it.

I like grafitti and the idea it embraces, but not the mindless teenage defacement of property.

What do you think about the hooded creeps who destroy railcars, ruin newly planted flower beds? Arty types? They are the same creeps who attacked a female newsteam outside of Legia. They are cowards.

Or should they be - as I think - chained to Kolumn Zygmunta and flogged live on TV ?

They aren't. Grafitti is deliberate damage to the built environment - prehistoric cave paintings are interior decor. ;-)


And explaining the HWDP by telling the visitors that it was an ancient late 20th/early 21st century Polish tradition to put your Huj W Dupie Policjanta :-))

But maybe the neighbours sneaked in and did it while the cave owners were out....?

Okay, hope you'll enjoy your time in jail...


I was being ironic, sobieski


Interior decoration of a cave today would be seen as deliberate damage...


:)) As wildrover said - I dread to think what they'll think of us...


;) That's a good point

That is some mighty impressive looking graffiti! Ours is crap compared to some of this artwork! If you are going to do it, do it right or don't do it at all!

I passed today the newly constructed viaduct at Dworzeć Gdański. Some moron had to to disgrace the new walls and fresh paint with some moronic legia graffiti. Where is the art in that? Where I come from they call that "vandalism".