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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notices the pro-tagging vs anti-tagging struggle session but choosing to ignore it because there’s nothing inherently good or bad about tagging
Everyone except the person who did the DPRK tag should be jailed for vandalism while the DPRK tagger should be promoted to municipal muralist whose main job is tagging every single dumpster with DPRK and other iconography related to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
More DPRK iconography getting painted on city property would certainly make me happy to see…
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anti graffiti is so funny i know it’s pretty low stakes not a heinous opinion or anything but enjoying seeing this thread filter out the total dweebs on here
Yeah, me too. I didn’t post this to be anti graffiti but it’s funny to see how many people think I did.
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Lol sorry, are you anti graffiti? On the bear site? Its one of the most basic forms of resistance against the concept of private property there is! Street art is often the expression of the creative who lacks the tools, resources, and space to be creative. Its a form of radical reclamation in the face of the enclosure of public spaces. It is the art of the oppressed and marginalized. Hobos created entire forms of language expressed through graffiti to communicate to other travelers if places where hostile or safe, if they had food or would provide lodging.
It is proletarian through and through!
i dont think they’re against it, look at the last post, they just posted because of the DPRK tag
Why is street art in quotes then? Seems to imply it’s not art.
graffiti includes things that aren’t reasonably art, like whoever wrote hemp on that dumpster in normal ass letters. i’d scarequote “street art” because it’s euphemistic and because in context we’re including stuff that’s less artistic than drawing a dong on the bathroom stall.
This. I’m a big fan of street art… when it comes to graffiti on par with/below bathroom stall dicks (which I’d argue can have some artistic value, depending on the amount of detail and if it’s drawn doing something, even if it’s “gross” subject matter) for artistic meaning, well, I can appreciate the “fuck the system” of it, especially on the property of corporations or shitty governments (less so on municipal infrastructure in a city that does its best to meet public needs, though), but I can acknowledge that a lot of it is kinda ugly.
Actual street art, though, graffiti with artistic meaning and aesthetic value, I’m a lot more in favour of, because yeah, it can look quite pretty or interesting, and I appreciate the effort that goes into it. Street art is a valid art form, and I dislike the use of that term as a euphemism for low effort tagging.
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All art is a form of progression from crude to elegant. In fact, you can even see that there are relational forms inside that specific tag that also appear in some other more “elegant” tags. For example:
The M in HEMP:
Other Ms in the image:
There is a pretty clear language of strokes and movements between these characters. Some of these are done in paint marker, others in spray paint. Learning how to control a spray can is an important skill to hone. Often these people lack the space to practice this, and even practicing it (if they are a youth) can be viewed negatively within their own home. These could be part of an initiation process as well. I really don’t know. However, to say that this is not “reasonably” art is, I think, disingenuous because art is a process that you hone over time. I don’t think people go out into the street and write HEMP on a dumpster for no reason. They do it because they are either A) being initiated into something or B) practicing. The reason you would be out in the field practicing is because the activity isn’t just about producing the art; it’s about producing the art without getting caught.
an infinitely wide category is a useless category. When we write our names on a “Get Well Soon!” card for a coworker we are not, as a baseline, doing art and if you insist that’s automatically art 100% of the time i think it’s impossible to have a discussion about art with you and suspect you of lying about not having fences.
You know that the “Get Well Soon” example of yours is not by any metric a fair or equivalent comparison. You are the one insisting that I do not have fences; I simply stated that art is a process, and all parts of that process constitute art. Tagging is part of the developmental process of the art form we are discussing known as street art. We are not discussing greeting card art, and it’s reasonable to state that when you sign a greeting card you purchased, it is not the same in any respect to what we’re actually discussing. Most people who have even a passing interest in street art would agree that tagging represents street art in its most elemental form. This idea that you can look at text in this context and somehow delineate between art and not art simply based on the stylistic choices made by the tagger is frankly absurd. What you are commenting about, the way the text is written, the “normal ass letters” clearly is consistent in a way that constitutes what is called a “handstyle” within the context of street art and tagging. I don’t claim to know everything about street art, but I do understand that the context this stuff exists in is far more complex than what you’re giving it credit for. I also understand its context historically in a broad sense. Tagging is a form of art, and it is the embryo of larger, more complicated works and a way to enter into an underground street art scene. Not every person who writes a tag on a dumpster seeks to be a street artist, but every street artist was once someone scrawling tags on a dumpster.
my point is, plain writing isn’t art by default. and i’ve never bought one of those cards, it comes out of petty cash or something
children practicing writing the letter O aren’t doing art unless they get distracted and start doodling, even though the dexterity you develop when learning how to write is a building block for future endeavors.
but every street artist was once someone scrawling tags on a dumpster.
statistically this must be untrue.
I’m not against street art, I think it’s really cool. I’m mostly just wondering what will happen next and keeping my favourite bears updated on what the taggers do and what the city does in relation to these DPRK tags.
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defacing public infrastructure isn’t art. And all it takes to be creative is a pencil and paper. A lot easier to acquire and use than a spray pain can.
lol
Lmao. You think taggers and graffiti artists don’t do that already?
If taggers do that they apparently aren’t sharing it with the world.
Lol yeah OK. I’ll just post some concepts I’ve sketched out of my illegal activities on the internet. That’s a very good idea.
twitterHexbear the only place where where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. you can say I like pancakes and somebody will say so you so you hate waffles no that’s a whole new sentence wtf is you talkin aboutMost of the tagging in Seattle isn’t even block lettering. It’s some random scribbles. They probably aren’t even in a normal mental state doing this stuff. People will go out of their way to draw a couple black lines on a random object. It baffles me.
Tagging the ugliest most obnoxious monstrosities in our urban environments is a perfectly good form of artistic expression. Making those monstrosities stand out more for the ugliness they are by making them even uglier is a good way to highlight them.
A nice object doesn’t attract tags.
Absolutely. I don’t think I’ve seen a single dumpster in this city without at least one tag on it. They’re garbage receptacles, sure, but do they have to be so ugly?
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how is a dumpster an obnoxious monstrosity
They’re ugly as sin. So ugly that we don’t even have them in the UK. The only places you’ll ever see them are at the back of commercial and industrial lots. All residential rubbish is handled through wheelie bins, and since wheelie bins are the personal property of each individual household they’re not tagged. They’re also not on the street at any time other than the day they’re collected, as opposed to dumpster monstrosities that sit there 24/7.
That’s not to say we don’t have our own monstrosities that attract tagging. Ugly as fuck electrical boxes that exist ubiquitously everywhere are pretty commonly tagged.
The dumpster here has wheels though, I’d assume it’s just for a MFH or maybe a business.
And then obvious follow up question: What do you want electrical boxes to look like?
What do you want electrical boxes to look like?
ah, right, I thought this was like a form factor issue
Form can probably be better too tbh. Exterior of the box could be more like a stone wall or something. Would fit better in Britain anyway. The sheet metal look isn’t great.
Do people not paint these where your at? A town over from me pay local artists to paint them.
My city has lots of painted electrival boxes like that, they do attract less tagging than plain ones and dumpsters.
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They’re murals and taggers hate that.
(waving his hand) i declare the opinion of all taggers (whom I hate) is that they hate other kinds of art like I do
Taggers are dickheads who treat the world like they’re dogs marking their territory.
A nice object doesn’t attract tags.
That is straight up bullshit
I would rather see a mililon tags instead of one more corporate advertisement
it’s fine lol you sound like total square curmudgeon ass take
Have you met a single tagger? Have you talked with them about why they do it?
They’re bored kids?
Imagine boiling down an entire subculture with deep history to “they’re bored kids.” Just so ignorant
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.
graffiti isn’t anti-social but it sure seems like you are
There is nothing virtuous about bourgeois infrastructure. Let it be tagged.
Is all infrastructure “bourgeois infrastructure”? Parks are “bourgeoisie”? Spray painting stuff with black lines isn’t revolutionary.
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.
If you polled the population of a city what percentage would say tagging is a net positive?
why are you such a curmudgeon you sound like abe simpson
At least Abe Simpson is funny when he yells at clouds.
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”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
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.
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
idk it’s kinda boring if you just write your name normally. at least do bubble letters if you’re not going to draw something.
I’ll just write your name normally and do mine in cute love hearts and bubble text
”multiple decades” so basically youre an old person trying to destroy the fun of younger people
Oh that must be it. Can’t draw from a reserve of knowledge and experience. I’ll just go about my business and enjoy scratchies on public train windows because someone had a good time doing it
yes, youre a socialist and by design collectivist and must tolerate people even if they annoy you sometimes. 😊
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.
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.
Lol are you my racist uncle, Jesus Christ…
Excuse me for not wanting dickheads like Pam the Bird to be traipsing around my city.
Lmao this is what you’re mad about???
Oh you mean this guy?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-27/pam-the-bird-graffiti-artist-bail/104988564
Love to see that we’re now supporting assaults on workers, stabbings and stealing personal property to go on libertarianesque screeds because of “art”
Earlier this week, Mr Gibson-Burrell’s grandmother Joan Bell told the court that she would offer him a place to stay in Geelong and could supervise a nightly curfew. “It’s my house, my rules,” she told the court. "I don’t believe everything in the media about some of this behaviour. “It’s not the grandson I know, so that’s a bit foreign to me.”
The court was told two businesses were considering offering Mr Gibson-Burrell work, and another friend was willing to put up a $30,000 surety to secure his release.
Jack Gibson-Burrell, 21, arrived at court on Thursday wearing a Spider-Man mask, then later exited wearing a full-body costume, flanked by his defence lawyer Micky Milardovic.
He crouched down and posed for cameras, before running down the street, appearing to attempt to scale CBD buildings.
Additionally, according to court documents, he has been charged with assault, behaving in a riotous manner at the Emporium shopping centre, trespass, damaging train carriages and abseiling a building more than 30 metres in height.
dudes rocking is apparently illegal in australia
Mr Gibson-Burrell has also been charged with damaging a “building of cultural significance with a vintage Uncle Tobys advertisement on it”, with the alleged damage to the tune of $99,110.
AUR NAUR, OUR ADVERTISEMENTS
what? are you alleging that this crime was done by the bird dude? what?
kind of rude but my experience with security guards who run up to try to intervene with things is fuck those guys, so
stabbings and stealing personal property
you’re just imagining things to get angry about now
kind of rude but my experience with security guards who run up to try to intervene with things is fuck those guys, so
Severe enough to be hospitalised, and your response is “kind of rude”. And your personal experience leads you to basically state that he had it coming to him.
Police also allege he was involved in ram-raiding a stolen car through a Nando’s restaurant in Footscray last year.
The car was spray painted with the words “We don’t accept cash here” and “Nando dogs”, the court heard.
Police also laid an additional charge of intentionally causing injury after Gibson-Burrell allegedly stabbed a man in January, the court heard.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-31/pam-the-bird-graffiti-court-case/104883382
“Imagining things”
Let’s also add from the Guardian article
Footage also played to the court showed a man with a resemblance to Mr Gibson-Burrell punching a worker at Melbourne’s Emporium shopping centre in 2023.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
looked it up, pam the bird is pretty cool I hope the guy gets off and visits my city, I’d love to come across a pam the bird
Might want to look up a bit further
I like the art and I can’t decipher what you’re trying to say here beyond that it’s definitely snide
So you only give a shit about state sanctioned street art. Got it. Weird take on the bear site, I gotta say.
There is an absolute world of difference between murals, political speech scrawl, large form pieces and tags.
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.
Man, this post was anti-graffiti all along? I thought it was a “rad, someone tagged ‘DPRK’ here” type of post. Disappointment in this website never ends
It’s not anti graffiti, what you said is about what I intended! It is rad!
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Nice, still sad to have shitters roll up to a post like this but glad to hear.
so you and other anti graffiti people in this thread type on here all day about wanting a revolution, taking breaks inbetween to scratch your ass and then not wash your hands before putting them back on the keyboard, but cant handle something as innocuous as street art from someone who is probably a teenager? seriously, how are you going to do anything meaningful in the overthrow of capitalism if this gets you riled enough to post about it?
if you knew anything about the history of street art you would understand why people do it. im not a street artist but i am inclined to defend them because i belong to the marginalized groups that started it
I’m not trying to be anti graffiti here! I don’t always understand it, but I do think it can be interesting to see, and to see what gets left alone and what gets “dealt with”. I’m mostly just curious what’ll happen next in the saga, and keeping you bears updated because you liked the last post.
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Wow do you hate the DPRK
No, but I think there’s a lot of nuance in discussing it and I’m not going to seriously get into that on the Commie Shitposting Website.
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For a whole someone was tagging “c-word’ city” all over my town and it was kinda fucking awesome, pretty certain it was meant as a positive thing based on the fonts and exclamation marks. I at least took it that way, gave me municipal pride.
That’s neat.
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I’m curious why this bothers you. Personally I don’t tag nor do I particularly enjoy this particular art. But tagging a dumpster brings the artists joy and doesn’t actually harm anyone, so from my perspective why should anyone care?
It doesn’t bother me! I think this post came off more negatively than I intended. I’m mostly just curious what will happen next, more than anything. Will the city clean it, when they usually leave graffiti on something like a dumpster alone, or was the swift removal of the last one down to the location, and will these tags pop up again.
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misunderstood your original post, thanks for the clarification
You’re welcome, thanks for acknowledging it.
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I love what my city did in a rough part of town that was being completely taken over by this type of ugly street tags.
On a big wall that was constantly attacked they hired an artist to create a huge mural, it’s absolutely beautiful and it represents the community that lives there.
It’s been there for like 15 years and it’s intact. No one touched it, no one vandalized it.
One I live near put a bunch of vines on the wall to prevent painting it’s a pretty elegant solution
I like this solution. See, street art is absolutely a form of art and can be quite interesting, it’s just that the “collaborative” nature of “tagging” leads to rather discordant and cacophonous results.
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My city did that in a tunnel on a walking path last year and unfortunately it got tagged over very quickly, made me sad
Genuenly I have no idea what brings people to tagging up public infrastructure, either nobody will know its you who did it or literally nobody will care. It just makes everything look uglier and uncared for.
It’s a simple way to gain some control over the world around you when you feel like you’re powerless and have no control.
Meh, I’m cool with people tagging stuff generically, as long as it’s not Nazi shit. IMO even crappy art is art, and it’s nice to see some actual art made by actual humans in the real world.
We got a person (persons?) In my region who has a really unique tag that looks like ΔΞʘ. They get that tag in the wildest places. Every time I see it, it’s exciting. Sometimes it’s not the height, its the volume, like when I saw they managed to tag every panel of highway sound walls for a good few miles near my place. It’s got to be a real thrill.
Partially marking territory, affiliation, messaging, practicing tags to put up a bigger piece when you have the time, scoping which walls get cleared/monitored, boredom, showing off (urbex skill/challenge), ‘going over’ a piece by some dickhead/direct disrespect
I don’t tag but i watched yt of a guy who does in my city and it made sense when he explained these reasons. Doesn’t bother me tbh. Inside/around public transport maybe if it damages the seats/covers signage/navigation is a bit shit but that’s fortunately not common
It’s a form of art and self expression, often practiced by people who feel they have very little power and control, and while some of it can look… discordant, it’s actually cool. Art by the powerless on the decaying edifices of a crumbling society. And it looks way better than a plain old dumpster.
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Im not referring to people tagging up dumpsters im referring to people regularly smashing up and tagging signs, subway stations, and public infrastructure. In the past people used to even smash windows and tag up subway cars themselves before the MTA stopped them. While yes some of it can look cool 99.9999999% of it looks identical.
Okay, that’s not cool. Actually damaging infrastructure, not just tagging ugly as sin municipal property, isn’t cool. What happened here in this post and my earlier one, though, is literally just spray paint and hurts no one, and that’s the kind of art and “property damage” I’m calling cool. Not actually destroying infrastucture in a way that prevents people from using it.
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I would appreciate graffiti more if it was genuenly original and creative, something more than literally just a name but stylized. People should start spraypainting revolutionary propaganda, that would be cool.
Agreed. I don’t hate tagging and I know why the powerless and downtrodden do it, but there’s a difference between graffiti and street art. My opinions of graffiti are nuanced and generally net neutral, but I really like genuine street art that says something more than just marking territory.
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Probably some teenagers going on a tagging spree, can’t do much about it
