The city does go after the people illegally tagging properties: https://sfstandard.com/2024/10/17/san-francisco-prolific-gra...

https://sfdistrictattorney.org/prolific-tagger-charged-with-...

https://sfist.com/2016/01/25/prolific_tagger_fined_over_200k...

Many more results if you search for “prolific tagger San Francisco”.

To be fair, not all graffiti on this site is non-consensual. For instance Jeremy Novy's koi fish. After living in Soma for time, everything else was a recurring pain mostly in terms of time I had to spend on it.

Regulating otherwise legal non-commercial speech on someone's own property is insane and sounds unconstitutional. If you want it there, or want it gone, that should be your own prerogative.

This site scrapes the city efforts to document who is doing "how much" damage/art.

Once they catch an artist in the act, they will use these archives to recommend a punishment.

But your point in valid - San Francisco likes graffiti.

> 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.

https://i.imgur.com/qaFgSm7.png

You have it backwards. It's the act of NOT fining them, NOT calling their parents, of ignoring small destructive acts that ruins lives.

Almost everyone doing a 10 year sentence for a serious crime started out by getting away with a lot of small ones.

I consider corporal punishment inherently barbaric. An appropriate fine or short stay in jail ought not be life-ruining.

Also, I think there are other effective approaches in some circumstances. People (including "the kids"), locally (Toronto) and other places I've heard of, have been paid (not a super common thing, but it happens) to do actual artwork. There's a mural I consider quite well done, not too far from my place, that isn't getting defaced even though it's in a place where I would otherwise ordinarily expect strong temptation to "tagging" and other graffiti.

Tons of people unfortunately see this as ok. My response to them is always "let me tag your car, your house, your laptop" and if you complain you're a hypocrite

I like "Street Art" where permission has been given. I don't like tagging and property destruction. Maybe when I get a little older I'll find some graffiti exhibit at a museum and go tag it.

No accounting for taste, but, graffiti is important whether it's aesthetically pleasing or not.

https://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/

Graffiti is a population's expression of ownership of their city. It's a very common form of countercultural resistance and therefore an important relief valve. It's a way for anyone to express themselves on their environment. A city only has value because it's occupied by many people, and those people need to express their autonomy and quite literally "leave their mark."

Not to mention, it's lovely to be connected to a common thread of humanity over literal millenia. Just as I scrawled onto a bathroom stall in 2005 "Cameron takes it up the bum," so too did Salvius write of his friend on a wall in the House of the Citharist in the year 79, "Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this."

I think there is a lot of nuance here. Just as councils and developers can construct ugly buildings artists can also add ugly work to walls.

I agree there is a spectrum. On one hand you've Banksy or Basquiat adding to a flat grey wall and creating art that has a political voice or some artistic merit and the other you've some twat scribbling hate symbols on a historic monument. I don't have on ideas on how we can ensure one and not the other though.

One of the most startling differences between Chinese and European cities is the lack of grafitti in China. I wonder if it's explained by laws, norms, enforcement?

Are there places people can legally grafitti there? In a number of small towns there are unofficial grafitti rocks or walls in public view that redirects a lot of peoples mischief and desire to display public art. Nobody is in any actual trouble if they are caught painting it although you will lose your paint.

It might not be a total solution, but it could have a significant impact on grafitti other places.

My theory is that graffiti is tied to the feeling of lack of agency in one's life. Everyone wants to "make their mark on the world". Some of us get to do that with an interesting career, building a family, getting involved in the community. If you feel excluded from all that, like those things are beyond your reach, you might resort to things like graffiti. IMO it's something that says "I exist, and I can change things around me" for those who don't have a better way to do that.

Based on that we "fix" the problem by making sure that everyone has a chance to make a fulfilling life for themselves. Better & freer education; Healthcare; cost of living & wage support. Etc.

I really enjoy graffiti murals, and I go out of my way to photograph them in my own city and when I travel. I will see them when I driving or walking around and stop to look for a moment and try to understand the perspective and message of the artist and take a picture if I can.

That said, I don't much like tagging, tagging is generally not art in my opinion even if you can say artist styles are used within it. Tagging is all about ego and selfishness, it's there purely for the sake of saying "I was here", as if you are the most important person in the city that you should claim to put your name on that wall.

I've met quite a few graffiti artists all over the world in my travels, and the people who tag and the people who paint murals are by and large /not/ the same people. The folks who paint murals are trying to say something, the folks who tag have nothing more to say than to try to create a monument of some kind to themselves. I don't respect taggers, I do respect muralists.

If you want to dissuade illegal graffiti, give people legal walls.

> You don't want to fine, jail or otherwise ruin the lives of thousands of kids to get them to stop.

Oh yes, you want to (with an asterisk). As a former Graffiti writer myself I can speak from experience that the judge will be the first person in those kids life taking their actions seriously, giving them any sort of guidance.

Better spend a couple of hours per month doing social work than letting them slip further away until no softer juvenile criminal code is there to protect them.

I think mostly here in switzerland, it’s tolerated in certain areas, and even directly sponsored, in Lausanne, nearly every pedestrian underpass is completely covered in pretty good work, every bit of street furniture has unique designs that seem to be left alone by taggers, areas that might otherwise be run down are covered in colourful murals that are regularly refreshed, i think this is the right approach.

To include the obvious in this discussion, it's your opinion that street art / graffiti makes things ugly; others feel differently. I think it brings places alive, brings human expression into the otherwise highly controlled environment. There's a spirit to it, and I love to see kids who have no voice take the step of speaking up. I love to see it, generally. To me it's a sign of freedom and very democratic.

As for it's quality as art, I don't buy that's a purely subjective, arbitrary opinion (meaning, I think it's reasonable to use some judgment). But people still differ greatly: look at their responses to abstract expressionism, for example; some people think it's trash, others pay tens of millions.

There is plenty of ugly in cities: There is a lot of ugly architecture; buildings are much more visually prominent and for aesthetics I would remove the ugly ones much sooner than removing the street art. There is ugly advertising and marketing; there are ugly industrial sites on beautiful waterfronts and in neighborhoods.

Should those be subject to the same judgement as some kids expressing themselves? The people who make the buildings, ads, sites have far more power and resources, including enough to make those beautiful. They seem much more responsible for the results than the kids, who may have nothing else.

Oh, i just saw the 20 lashes thing, rather have graffiti than fascists

I like graffiti - even random tags over blank walls because it’s a sign people are truly living and breathing in a space.

As long as there have been walls there has been graffiti. Spaces without graffiti are artificial and antiseptic.

If a graffiti artist believed shitting on a lawn was art, they would, but they don't.

The problem and solution are similar to OSS:

The problem: the artists have something to say, they want as many people as possible to see it and use it.

The solution: make it free, and put it where as many people as possible can access it.

Yes, I just compared graffiti to github.

> You might as well just shit on someone else's lawn and say it's fine because it's art.

Are you referring to 'tagging' (putting your, or your gang name on something)?

I agree.

Referring to well-crafted, or political (think banksy), images, i agree less. Unless i don't like the image/style then it's only lawn-worthy.

There are terms within the scene - tag, throwie, piece, burner - but they are not generally known by the wider public.

https://www.kmuw.org/beautiful-city/2014-08-04/what-were-tal...

https://www.instagram.com/p/COrxyrCMkOx/

Graffiti is the catch-all, but "street art" vs "tagging" have pretty clearly distinct meaning.

Is "street art" not the name? Like how "comics" are low but "graphic novels" are respectable.

English does, and definitely invented it before the rest of the world caught on to this culture. Try watching “Wild Style” from 1983, documenting some of the earliest beefs between the types of graffiti artists. Portuguese speakers did not invent this distinction.

Throw ups are the quick ones and Pieces are the long ones.

I'm probably the minority where I don't mind any graffiti, quality or not. As long as it isn't horribly offensive or impacting the functionality of something (over signs/glass/etc). Think I just prefer the look of a wall covered in even shitty tags and pasted posters over a completely blank slate.

I particularly love seeing peoples stickers about.

Why did you leave San Francisco?

Did you see the fish on pavement? Looks like it took great skill to get the shadows right. I've got goosebumps looking at them!: https://stfu.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/sf-graffiti/138...

It's unfortunate that the city threatens to fine the owner of the property: https://stfu.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/sf-graffiti/138...

I see machines/AI doing almost all the production and heavy lifting. Most urban streets have a brothel, a bar (not necessarily alcohol), a couple art/cultural clubs, something for repairing/dealing with transport. No one pays much mind to the physical view of the street because they're communicating/experiencing most of it through augmented reality of some manner.

on desktop i had to click on the small black area between two pictures before scrolling with left/right arrows became possible ... very bad UX

It works great on mobile. That's more than I can say for most things.

He is indeed incredibly prolific, anyone taking a train around london will recognise 10FOOT.

But he is not an artist, he literally just tags 10Foot in what could be described as looking like it was done with a marker pen.

something like this is very typical: https://ldngraffiti.co.uk/graffiti/writers/flash?pic=152931&...

I enjoy good graffiti, but 10FOOT does not fall into that category.

It’s all Banksy and “wall art” til you get an ugly stick figure drawing sprayed on your storefront/door. Also commercial property owners doing bad stuff and vandalism are not mutually exclusive bad things

Well yeah, of course they do. Contrary to what what some in this thread are claiming, the modal graffiti isn't self expression or a yearning for freedom. It's tweaking people's noses by altering the property without permission. You can't do that on a designated spray area, so those people have to go into the neighborhoods to get their jollies by pissing people off.

Enabling the browser's scrollbar would also be good.

I don't know anyone in tech who enjoyed watching gangs mark their territory with tags in their neighborhood.

I'm surprised and also not. We're a long ways away from 90s hacker culture, and even then there were plenty of upper class kids that were just in it for good pay working for the giant tech corps. We like to romanticize everyone dropping acid and being part of the counter culture, myself included, but reality is different.

The saddest part to me is that the aesthetic of street art has been totally consumed by major corporations and spit back out on to the streets here in Brooklyn. I laugh to myself whenever I walk by a tourist taking a selfie in front of some mural that is really just some brand advertisement.

>I'm surprised to see so many anti-graffiti comments here.

I'm not. HN trends toward the most suburban conformist mindset possible.

That is arguably the point. They are taken from the SF city website and are placed in arbitrary order. I personally love this unfiltered take.

There's more to get from these than just aesthetics, precisely because they're not curated.

If they're not covering windows, signs or art, what is being vandalized? A blank slab of concrete performs its function equally well no matter the color.

It is illegal. It gives the population the idea they have the right to alter their environment, and that's dangerous.