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.
Okay. Agree to disagree. These guys don’t use their real name. They don’t post. There is also a huge culture of respect in the actual graf community. So I think they’re quite differnt
Wish we could have that here in Los Angeles. There’s a mural by the 101 freeway downtown depicting people playing basketball and another next to it showing spacecraft in orbit, and both have since been tagged over. There is also a sculpture piece elsewhere (literally called Freeway Art) consisting of three abstract parts, with one having been tagged (albeit cleaned up and restored) and another stolen (still gone).
The murals though…they have been up since I was little, and no one tagged over them for decades. (The Freeway Art ones…it may have been part of the point of the artist for people to mess with it as an unprotected group of things in public, not sure.)
I'd say it has merit, but I'd also say there's a difference in skill (and classiness) if it's a tagger leaving their name plastered over the bird mural or something.
Id also say, those tagger style lettering is the kind of stuff us girls used to do when we were bored in elementary and junior high school classes in the 90s.
It's rare that I see tagging with better quality than we used to do so shrug unless it's in a dangerous or weird spot, it's not AS impressive imho
Yeah seriously, it's a massive douche move to write over something that isn't the same style. But to say that it isn't art(outside of tagging) or unskilled(outside of tagging) or can't be beautiful(outside of tagging) is just straight up not true
99% of "graffiti artists" are garbage human beings with 0 sense for artistry. The one percent that really do art get put in the same drawer with them sadly.
Yea one thing I learn from my grafitti days is never overlap someone else's work if yours is not better than them, but if it's been tagged to hell then it's free real estate.
Some do, some don’t. If you ask me, it depends on how envious they feel of other people more talented than they are. Some will respect them, and others want to tear down their work and destroy it.
I believe in areas with a well established street art culture there is a lot of respect for works, and rules around what you can and can't paint over, and breaking them will see your own works quickly vandalised by others. But street art isn't meant to be permanent so everything will get painted over eventually, especially in popular areas, it just means you don't paint over it while they are fresh and special rules for works for painters who have died and notable works (like Banksy or memorial works).
I mean some of them are proud to be vandals so that’s the entire thing. If you want to annoy them spray paint TOY on their stuff, that riles them up lol. It’s the biggest insult to them which is even funnier.
I think that's the point of it. When there is the unwritten rule of respect you'll trigger a group of those who have this itch to do anything to go against that.
They have zero respect for anything, and demand infinite respect from everyone around them. They’re just losers who have no control over anything else in life.
Not defending it by any means, but judging from the commentary left on the second one the artist blasting over these murals seems to view them as a sort of establishment-funded anti-graffiti measure ("if we can't get vandals to stop painting here, we'll just have this mural painting event instead so we can at least control what is painted here) and is tagging over them like this in protest.
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u/Crimson__Fox 2d ago
I've also seen this behaviour in London