I live near Paris, and it's a shame to see this sort of thing on every surface here. It's so easy and effortless to trash the look of a place, and so much effort and pain to get it back to a presentable state. It just seems hopeless trying to stop it.

Sure, you can point to examples of graffiti that don't look all that bad, and I imagine some examples can even be considered to improve the look of a space. But taking this site as a random sample, the "good" ones are a vanishing minority. For every subtle Invader mosaic high on a building, you get dozens of effortless name tags that just wreck the look of a place.

Adding frustration is the fact that there's no way to effectively dissuade people from doing this. You don't want to fine, jail or otherwise ruin the lives of thousands of kids to get them to stop. You just want them to stop spraypainting shit. It's really the only example I can think of where I'd support some form of corporal punishment. Catch kids in the act, 20 lashes in the town square to convince them not to do it again, then set them to work with a wire brush until they can demonstrate that it's back to the state they found it. Even still, I can't imagine it would really do much to dissuade.

It's a shame.

The thing that really gets me about graffiti is that you don't own the canvas. It's just vandalism. If you're commissioned to do it one someone else's wall, I'd call that a mural instead, and I see quite a few aesthetically pleasing ones around. Why can't you paint on stuff you actually own, instead of making it someone else's problem? You might as well just shit on someone else's lawn and say it's fine because it's art

Having a bit of a cultural shock at how English doesn't have a separate name for the "cruder" graffiti (such as tags) vs the more socially accepted street art. The former is typically called "pichação" [1] in Portuguese, and I was taught this distinction when learning about modern art movements back in elementary school.

[1] https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picha%C3%A7%C3%A3o - I recommend looking into a machine translated version of the Portuguese Wikipedia article, as the English Wikipedia article reads far more biased

Cool, but why lay out the images in such an annoying way? Whatever happened to simple, functional photo galleries? I miss them.

We have places in Zurich where anyone can spray (I'm sure most cities have designated areas like this) but they still come out into the neighborhoods and do it. Its usually in areas with poor refugee/subsidized housing but the people doing the graffiti are local young swiss, making areas where they don't live shittier.

I’m the early 2000s I worked as an assistant producer on a San Francisco graffiti documentary featuring several of these artists

https://youtu.be/7Ub8uRFzUCQ

Fascinating, I do love street art and tastefully done graffiti. Some of it is obnoxious. I think it does add to the character of a city e.g. New York, Berlin, Montreal, Paris all have some amazing work etc.

I submit Irish Graffiti I see here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Graifiti/

Though I think displaying these things as a map is more useful: https://streetartcities.com/cities/sanfrancisco

There is a an Irish artist called Dan Leo and I have bought lots of his prints. https://www.danleodesign.com/ so they are dotted around my office and home.

I think they're great! He does animals and I love the style, clean lines and bright colours, they remind me of US football team logos.

As an aside, the Financial Times (yes, that one) did a great interview a couple of years ago with prolific London graff artist 10FOOT.

The comments were predictably howling with rage and injustice ("he's a criminal!!", says employee of cartel laundry HSBC), but I enjoyed it a lot.

https://www.ft.com/content/45a184ee-b7d9-4c16-b1c2-71def32cc...

Lasercats that was briefly on the old theatre on Divisadero remains a favorite. This was like 15 years ago.

https://mergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/xndqw-full.jpg

I like the concept, wish it was a vertical scroll with some safe margins between each picture (also to give them more stage time and removing the noise/distraction from many pictures stitched together)

As a suggestion,

* Orientation - some images are sideways,

* Option to walk through by date order, and by location ...

There is an audience for the time ordered flux of images on particular sites (at least in Australia).

I wish there were more of this: https://stfu.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/sf-graffiti/696...

Would have looked further, but scroll wheel finger cramped. Keyboard nav would be great.

This collection is a bit ordinary and unremarkable. There are many great large format, new/used print books on street art

I scrolled pretty far and didnt see Borf in there. Was that Web 2.0 ?

Some of these are great.

I expect the mundane "wildstyle" tagging on train cars but have been surprised a few times to see trains roll through town with much more complex graffiti. I'm happy to see examples of some of that more artful work in this post.

If you've seen the film, "Brother From Another Planet" you might look at graffiti a little differently as I do. :-)

Beautiful and disgusting at the same time.

It’s vandalizing public property in the same way that human shit vandalizes a lot of public property in SF. I don’t know which one is worse. One can be beautiful, the other is done because he has no choice.

For graffiti I’m in support of lashing or whipping the people that do this. It’s effective in Singapore. But then we lose all this great public art.

If graffiti changed anything it would be illegal.

It's ok

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