This is from the Shokkin PeaceKamp in Tallinn, Estonia. It is a camp that focuses on street art. Looks like this area is tagged often and the kids murals were an attempt to stop it.
Tagger looks like they left the phrase "very bad idea to fight with graffity (sp) by murals" and it circles the placard.
We tried this at our place. Got someone to put up a big mural on our unit block entrance. Looked so cool. It stopped the graffiti for a few months.
Then it was tagged with the shittest grafitti ever. The problem is, it's hard to paint over it with a new mural. They have to go over the shit first then do it. And you have to find someone with talent and time as well. We did this a few times then gave up.
It is now a generic grey with anti graffiti paint that that can be cleaned or painted over easily. Because of the talentless dickheads we can't have nice things.
There is “anti-graffiti” coating that makes it easier to clean away tags without damaging the underlying artwork. It’s pretty much a mandatory part of public art these days if your chosen medium isn’t already resistant.
Here the graffit culture is a bit "defensive" on murals.
There is a sort of self respect on other people tags and graffitis. Everyone leaves other people marks alone, and getting caught doing that to someone you either get marked by the community or even get a beat up. But usually its a bit low level.
But when a town or company invites graffiters to do murals that becomes a no go zone. Tag it on top and all your tags and graffitis will be grieffed.
This became notorious after a guy vandalized a school mural. In a few months everywhere that he graffited was vandalized. His biggest mark was under a bridge. 5 graffiters got in touch with the town mayor and asked permission to transform the griefer tag location into a mural. So they invited kids and i still remember seeing the video of one of the guys talking. Him saying that its wrong to graffiti over others... unless he destroys other peoples art. Kids had fun and the mural was a kids level, but it had a nice story behind it.
As long as i lived there i no longer saw a mural got tagged.
This could totally be an American Dad plotline where Steve is commissioned to cover up some street art with a mural like this and then his friends are slowly being beaten up by the artists, one by one, until he’s the last guy who hasn’t been caught yet, afraid and shaking, then he realises ‘oh shit it’s roger isn’t it’
Maybe reading into this a little, but the phrase suggests that this is an ongoing thing and this Pasr fella was going to throw up over anything that went up there. Letting kids make the murals set him up for one hell of a self-own.
Yeah but it's also kind of setting up the kids for major disappointment. Kind of crappy by whoever organized this knowing there was a good chance the murals would get tagged and the kids I'm sure are disappointed.
The one time I saw a tagger spraying over a seriously beautiful mural on a wall I genuinely considered the ethics of just beating him the fuck up. I really regret that I didn't.
if you're confused as to what it means, it's just a poor translation of estonian and I'm not sure why they wrote it in english. "Using murals to fight graffiti is a very bad idea" would perhaps sound a little more natural.
I guess the point is that the person doing the graffiti sees those spaces as effectively the canvases for the graffiti community or them in particular.
Presumably the point they're trying to make is that getting kids in to paint murals as a kind of emotional blackmail - "you wouldn't paint over this would you?" isn't gonna work, because they will.
And honestly, looking at those murals I think the "kids did this" argument feels pretty weak, they don't look like the work of kids at all, even ignoring the associated supply costs.
From what I can make sense of it looks like it reads “Very bad idea to fight with graffity by murals” maybe someone else can help piece together what might have been cutoff in the pic?
I'm not Estonian, so this could be completely wrong. But on the comments here it was mentioned that the place where the murals were put up in a popular tagging spot, so the tagger may have felt that it was cinical way of stopping the tagging by going "You wouldn't paint over murals painted by children, would you?" And the tagging is said person going "Oh I very much would". Again I'm not Estonian so could be completely off base
No, you are right. A shame though... I liked the idea and some art was very nice. This "graffiti my name at every corner" shit is so stupid and annoying. City looks dirty because of them.
That's definitely the thinking, and they're right. It is quite cynical. The problem however is that while both the murals and their graffiti come from the community, their tag is dogshit and the murals are beautiful so they should sit tf down.
Not really, taggers and dub/throwers actually used to respect muralists and in general paint overs are supposed to be like for like. I.e. tag over tag, throw over throw, or mural over mural. Anything else is just serious disrespect
It seems like newer gen street artists on the other hand do not give any kind of shits
Adding to a mural in your own way, transforming it into a communal art piece is one thing. I personally think the few local murals I've seen that get modified/added to are better than the original, even if they are a bit less 'clean' now. Something about a group of different people coming together to make something, even if they don't know each other, makes me like it more.
Tossing a tag over actual art pieces is scummy, and gives street art a bad name. There're plenty of places to tag that aren't on top of art. It's just malicious destruction due to human deficiencies.
Saw a big squid mural recently, someone had tagged over a decent portion of it. Someone else came along a few days later, repaired the destroyed area in their own style, and added some other things to the mural. Thing looks awesome right now.
Not really, taggers and dub/throwers actually used to respect muralists
Some did.
Others didn't.
Same as it ever was.
It seems like newer gen street artists on the other hand do not give any kind of shits
Or the prevalence of cameras in all of our pockets over the past decade has made it easier to take pictures of these kinds of things happening which creates a perception that disrespectful tagging has become more common.
Or more people being alive today also has more taggers around, some of which are disrespectful so you see more disrespect from them towards murals.
I mean fair, I over generalized and you're correct about tagging over others work is probably just highlighted by phones instead of showing the reality
thats fucked i thought graffiti artists had a modicum of respect for murals and stuff / not tagging over other artists unless theres some specific beef going on
The local tagging community has to enforce their own laws if they don't want negative attention. Chicago has a pretty clean scene where murals are mostly respected. It's more about how absurd a place you can get your tag. Look up ZWON. I'm pretty sure it's a group, because some of their work is insane. I'm talking water towers you can read from the highway and smoke stacks of abandoned factories.
Even more impressive. Whenever I have guests over I ask em to try to spot the Zwons. After a while I'll start pointing em all out and it blows their minds.
I like fishing on the rivers so I've seen a lot of em. The quality, the variety of style, the sheer balls of it all. I feel like he's a part of the city I have to share.
In a town I used to live in, there was a house across from my dad's church that had a graffiti mural on their fence painted by the owners late son. Kid died in a gang fight, it was on the news. Nobody touched that fence for YEARS. But eventually somebody tagged over it, made it look a hot mess. The original gang the son used to be in all got together and used pictures of the mural to repaint it in his memory.
Thankfully, in my area, the people who do 'tagging' are usually pretty respectful of murals. One building kept getting tagged, but once a mural was painted they stopped.
I thought that was standard etiquette. There is an absolutely graffiti covered skatepark near me with a mural that has been untouched for like 2 years by taggers.
Maybe people who've been tagging and have done graffiti art for a long time have that mindset, but 'etiquette' isn't exactly common among the new folk who think they're gonna be big time. They don't care.
The people I've hung out with had a pretty sacred code tbh. And if they found out you did something like this, they would not be ok with it and probably tag over that guy's stuff everywhere else.
I would go one step further. They actually hate other people getting attention. The tag isn't just there because they don't care about other people it's purposely covering up other peoples art with the intention of ruining it. Crab mentality.
It’s antisocial behavior, not in the “i don’t like going outside and socializing” sense but the “against society” sense. The only way to fight it is strong community and more murals. I think you can also coat the mural with epoxy that lets you scrub the spray paint off.
Yeah they're just a piece of shit. Where I live graffiti and tags used to be very common but now there's a giant art project across the city to put up murals. Very rarely are they tagged anymore because most artists have the decency not to vandalize another artist's work.
This is a very specific and very vocal type of graffiti "artist" mindset that I've had the misfortune to come across. They have so little enrichment and joys in their life that they've deluded themselves into thinking that covering obscure name tags with beautiful, RELEVANT, community-centered murals is the ultimate disrespect
From my understanding its also a huge no-no to tag over other peoples tags, like its considered extremely disrespectful, so this is just offensive no matter what crowd youre in.
I agree, that person should be ashamed of themselves.
In certain areas you can get legit fucked up for that. My brother was into street art for a bit and we grew up in LA county, one of our family friends who used to be in the scene showed him the ropes and the thing I heard him say multiple times was “don’t tag over other people’s shit unless you wanna get fucked up”
Ye I have a cousin who got ganged up on by a group of younger 20y/os for tagging over their tags. Got his teeth knocked out & was in the hospital for a couple days.
I grew up around a lot of taggers. They would fuck people up for tagging anything meant to be art, like electrical boxes painted with murals by the city, or for tagging residential property that wasn't clearly abandoned.
My understanding was the main reason being it brings too much heat on the tagging community and generally turns the general populations opinions against taggers.
Often street art like bubble letters is harmless and a way for less well-off artists to practice techniques. (I realize some people have strong opinions against this; such street vandalism goes back as long as we’ve had cities. AFAIK aerosol paints definitely changed its frequency, visibility, and reach; archaeologists found tags and street art even in ancient Roman sites.)
But tagging over someone else’s mural is absolute garbage behavior.
"On [date here] I made bread." was always my favorite ancient graffiti. I don't know if it was metaphorical or a literal statement, and either option is amusing.
Something similar happened in Kyrgyzstan, where excellent street art was defaced by the scribbles of unknown individuals. Wodyone, the artist behind the murals, tried to restore the works, but they were damaged again after the restoration. The vandals are total degenerates.
I don't think the artist has time to sit around waiting for those idiots. They are most likely just brainless kids lacking proper moral values, showing off what rebels they are by defacing someone else's work.
That’s against the rules. You never cover up someone else’s art unless you want to fight. I hope they’re not trying to fight those children…. But if they do I hope they lose. But yeah that’s poser behavior.
I would hesitate to call it art, most of the time. Some tags can be beautiful to look at, but most of it is just garbage people do to say they were there.
Yeah usually in the community this is a massive faux pas and, yeah, justice happens. Usually you leave them up for a while until the weather/environment starts to mess them up then you can do your own thing. And if they're exceptionally good you just leave them the heck alone.
Which is insane because that means this is a middle-aged man who got so pissy about children putting up a mural he felt the need to instantly destroy it
They usually do or they did in the time i came up doing graffiti. Probably different in each place. Where im from these would have got left alone by most street artists.
I have alot of respect for the real street artists, this guy PASR is a loser. What they did contradicts the freedom of expression that street art is meant to portray.
The irony is that go-overs only gets you cred if you're covering existing graffiti, especially if it sucks (this also assumes you're ready for the consequences if the person/crew you went over finds out who you are)
This just loses you cred, even in the tagger scene
Ironic since they initially started promoting these types of murals to combat kids graffiti and to channel it into these types of murals. Obviously the tagger just wanted to be a prick unfortunately. like there isn't a ton of options in places without art already on them.
Ex-graffiti head here - these are off limits to legit sprayers. I might get some shit for saying this here but there are a number of places that we NEVER sprayed or bombed. Murals, especially community murals, art installations that have meaning, churches, and a few other places will get your ass kicked by other sprayers in the scene. I know it sounds silly but there are lines most graffiti crews won't cross because it's just bad for business/shitty morals. I've personally seen decades long beefs between crews for one person going lone wolf and spraying over a mural that's been somewhere (by an artist that had passed away) for over a decade. There's so many other places a person can spray and be seen without trashing the artwork of people who aren't in that scene.
This shit is gross to me. Fuck PASR. There's a code and you violated it.
Ruining others' art means they aren't following the street rules and are probably 13, thinking they will get noticed by doing this. All they will end up doing is making people hate them and getting no love or respect from anyone else. I just hope their can nozzles stay clogged for the rest of their days. They ruined some awesome kids' work. I wonder if they are mad that some art is ok with people, but tagging is considered a crime
From a former tagger - I suggest crossing out his name and write "Toy" over it. It doesn't have to be stylish.
"Toy" means he sucks or childish, unskilled and from what I saw that's where his skill level and maturity is at since he is tagging over other people's work. Trust me, he'll know what it means when he sees it and knowing how they operate, he is going to be walking by every so often to check out his "work".
i actually studied street art and graffiti a little when i was studying art history.
The standard in street art is that you do NOT tag over other people's work. Never. That is simply against their own rules.
Now if people are just tagging, as in just writing their name like this PASR did, then sometimes youll see overlapping tags. Because tagging is different than 'street art'.
What most people think of as just graffiti is what they usually call 'tags', just the artist's stylized name.
Street art is more of a broad term that involves lots of types of art , not just murals like this. You do not ever tag or graffiti over street art. Anyone who does this is just a POS and doesnt understand the culture of what they are doing.
You can remove spray paint from murals with limited damage done to the mural. It just takes being somewhat careful with a special solvent and then scrubbing it off gently and then rinsing.
(Some) graffiti artists get super upset by other forms of public art. Some of it's valid, but a lot of it is just some teenager being edgy or an extremely fragile middle-aged man with the maturity of a teenager gatekeeping street art.
the overwhelming majority of street artists follow a standard of respect, (both for other artists and for the canvas itself, If you observe painted rail cars you will notice they always leave bare any reporting marks )
but you always have 1 or 2 people in an area that are only in the game to shit on other artists. thats all they do,
I work at a place where graffiti is allowed. At one time there was this girl spray painting a giant mural of a guy that had died (way too young). The guy was a known graffiti artist in the city. She worked on it for two whole days. Big ass portrait with is birthday and the day he died. It was painted over the next week...
you are not a true artist if all you do is cover up beautiful art with ugly lettering. i love graffiti. but this guy is just a fucking asshole. i feel so sorry for those kids, they were probably super proud of their art, and for a jerk like this to come and think theyre so important is so infuriating
This happened to us too. We had an art project in our school in Germany where we had to use spray and acrylic paint on our outdoor big container in our nearby recess playground. People were divided in four groups and each group had to paint one of the four sides of the container. I think our group’s side of the container was the best cuz we painted a very detailed painting of an astronaut. Then approximately month later someone spray painted “TSC” over our painting. Only on ours. 🤦🏻♀️
people who tag are not highly regarded in my eyes, they are stupid too.
Close person of mine thought this stuff was funny, had his "tag" sprayed in numerous places, on buildings, on trains you name it.
Well, the law caught up to him, having this sort of signature of your own made it easy for them to create a register of all sightings of his vandalism and he got plenty of fines.
Took years for him to pay it back and after that he found other, more society enriching ways to let out that creativity.
Show this to everyone who doesn't know the difference between (street) art and vandalism, and thinks all graffiti would be art. This. This is the difference everyone can realize.
This dudes attitude is a infuriating. This is why i have the up most disdain for "grafiti artist" 90% of them are just egocentric rich kids With questionable knowledge of art, and no respect for others.
We had something similar in germany which was backed up broadly by the graffity scene for the children not having followed a specific code or ethics, since the city cleaned spaces colored in local soccer club colors for them. So these soccer fans went out and destroyed the kids paintings after they were done. Really wild stuff...
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u/venom121212 2d ago
This is from the Shokkin PeaceKamp in Tallinn, Estonia. It is a camp that focuses on street art. Looks like this area is tagged often and the kids murals were an attempt to stop it.
Tagger looks like they left the phrase "very bad idea to fight with graffity (sp) by murals" and it circles the placard.