I think this might be the same person who did this last time, it’s very close to where I saw the last one. Which the city dealt with in a matter of days from when I saw it, so maybe this particular canvas of street art will also get cleaned/painted over.

(I’m not against street art - I’m rather fond of some of the prettier examples of it as an art form, and tagging is an interesting form of self expression - I just said that in that I’m curious how long it will take the city to do something about this tag, since the previous one I found on City property also caused it and nearby graffiti to be quickly cleaned when previously ignored, and graffiti on a trash receptacle is the ultimate “not worth cleaning”.)

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          • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            33·
            2 days ago

            It’s a subculture that presents itself as just ugly writing on infrastructure. There is no world where it’s anything other than that. And it’s anti-social.

            “Subcultures” are not inherently virtuous. There are Nazi subcultures too.

            • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              10·
              2 days ago

              And it’s anti-social.

              Is it? From the perspective of the graffiti community it’s pro-social in a space where the architecture and environment they’re reclaiming is anti-social.

                • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  6·
                  2 days ago

                  Depends, are we asking Bristol, Liverpool, London and Manchester or are we asking Birmingham? In the first 2 it’s going to be majority positive with Bristol being overwhelmingly 95%+ positive because of the Stokes Croft graffiti culture basically being proud city heritage to the point that half the city is caked in it from the floor all the way up to the sky on half the buildings in the city. In London? I think majority positive but maybe close to like 50%. In Birmingham? Negative because it’s full of dipshits.

                  You’re asking someone in the UK here though and you have to consider how much Banksy has had an impact on cultural perception of graffiti in this country. Incidentally, Banksy cut his teeth in Stokes Croft which is filled with some of his most famous work, he also was considered a menace at one point, until he infamy turned into outright fame as a national hero due to the left picking his work up positively and helping him along due to the political leaning of it.

                  When a city lets go, this is what happens: https://www.luckysophie.com/2024/03/ou-voir-du-street-art-a-bristol.html

                  • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                    2·
                    1 day ago

                    Graffiti and tagging really aren’t the same thing. Maybe some of the same people do actual art and just tagging but in Seattle we have almost no actual “graffiti”. It’s almost entirely just…

                    just dogs pissing on stuff.

                    and I guess this one has a couple actual colors compared to most which is just black or white paint in random scribbles. Sometimes they do it on the sidewalk and it just looks like someone spilled a paint can. There’s also this weird brown solid foam stuff that looks like actual shit. Not sure what it is although I think that’s some kind of drug addict thing.

                    At least when construction workers mark things with paint sometimes you can decipher what they were/are trying to fix or install and it tells a little story.

                    Sometimes it’s nice to actually look at a thing that’s just a solid color and admire the infrastructure itself and what makes a city function.

                    The tagging on this metal box is far less interesting than the fact that it says its flammable, some kind of gas infrastructure. There was some old-timey looking gas pump next to it (which to people’s credit seemed to be un-tagged).

                    Whatever it’s not a big deal.

              • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                1·
                2 days ago

                Is all infrastructure “bourgeois infrastructure”? Parks are “bourgeoisie”? Spray painting stuff with black lines isn’t revolutionary.

                • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  3·
                  1 day ago

                  The state is a white supremacist bourgeois state and decides which areas get parks and which parks get funding, as well as which areas get improved or well-maintained infrastructure. So yes, it is all bourgeois infrastructure because it is a bourgeois state. One prime example of this is the public pool. During the Jim Crow era, public pools were very common in the country. However, once states were forced to desegregate, many towns and cities opted to close their public pools instead of desegregating them. Redlining also had a massive impact on park access.

                  Parks created through the labor of the local community without the permission of the state and maintained by the community are as close as you can get to proletarian parks. Gorilla gardening is a form of proletarian public works that can transform a vacant lot into a usable public space.

                  It’s not that difficult to understand when some communities get the nicer parks or parks at all and others don’t. That’s the state in action. Would proletarian water systems become as neglected as Flint, Michigan? Unlikely. The under-maintained water system is a reflection of the bourgeois state. Infrastructure in America was historically delivered to white communities first and maintained at a higher level than non-white communities.

                  I mean, for fuck’s sake, Fed Hampton had to deal with this exact shit about putting up their own fucking stop signs because the state wouldn’t!

    • opiumfree [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      24·
      3 days ago

      ”like theyre dogs marking their territory” wait until you open your first book of theory and learn that capitalist leaders do this and would even send YOU to die over it. get over yourself

      • ShareThatBread [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        62·
        2 days ago

        I have seen the discourse of taggers in my city many many times over the multiple decades. This is a place renowned for its laneway graffiti if that gives a clue.

        It is literally the culture to just tag your name in places to show you were there and take pride in that fact. It is not about being against the system other than some vague notion of being against the system.

        And they absolutely hate muralists.

        • KuroXppi [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          20·
          2 days ago

          It is literally the culture to just tag your name in places to show you were there and take pride in that fact.

          Dope, that’s cool enough for me. If rich bozos can throw their polluting corpses at the feet of everest, or the wreckage of the titanic, and expect to be applauded why can’t some person tag the Bolte

    • Athena5898 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      17·
      2 days ago

      Humans are artistic people. Especially when it comes to community and show casing it. Through out history people have done everything they can to do art wherever they have been. Including what is now called tagging and graffiti.

      Its funny cause we don’t consider it graffiti when its a archeological find from century ago. Some of the things that helped paint a picture of every day life. Did you know there is a viking runestone in Oklahoma? Sure sucks that ancient viking left that and dirty up the place huh?

      And you’ll say “but this is different” how? Do you think random viking guy knew his random ass stuff would be consider a archeological gold mine? We never know what will be important like that in the future. Its literally all the same stuff the only difference is the when and how.

      Tagging is not something that is going to go away. moralizing it and policing it is not going to work. So its time to re examine it and figure when is it actually a problem and how to channel it in the correct ways.

      • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        12·
        2 days ago

        Ancient Rome was covered in dick drawings and “Caesar’s mum lul” jokes. Graffiti has been part of humanity for as long as there have been buildings.

            • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              3·
              1 day ago

              In the sense that some are sanctioned by the state whereas some are not, absolutely. State-sanctioned murals are a response to unsanctioned street art. It allows the state to curate its message while engendering the appearance of progressivism and continuing to erase the art and speech of people who operate outside the state’s jurisdiction and message.

              Tagging is the first step in the process of becoming a street artist when working outside the law, similar to how dealing weed can be the stepping stone to growing it. I don’t make this comparison between street art and illegal weed lightly either. In the same way that weed legalization is a form of primitive accumulation, state-sanctioned street art aims to disenfranchise those who built the culture. It does this to create wealth among those who did not build the culture by denying those culturally foundational people the ability to participate in the act legally.

              Artists with no connection or background in street art are commissioned by the state to produce art for the state in a manner similar to patronage. The state gets to control the work of the artist while the artist can contribute to sustaining themselves off the pay provided by the state. Except, just like with legal weed production, the vast majority of the contracts and licenses that are handed out by the state are unreachable or denied to members of the community that created the market to begin with. Many times people caught doing street art have additional charges tacked on that increase the severity of the sentence, and the adoption of legal street art (again, much like legal weed) did not come with it, pardons, or any other meaningful commuting of sentences.

              This is a form of enclosure and gentrification. Its whole aim is to “improve” the aesthetic of a given area by appropriating the street art style and history while pushing out actual street artists. This naturally benefits petite bourgeois elements of the area’s population by, again, appealing to liberal progressives, who view murals and street art as the same thing when they are fundamentally not. They view it as the state “accepting” street art and legitimizing it. Not as what it really is, an enclosure of the formally “public” spaces once claimed and owned by the organically forming illegal street art scene within a city or town.