What do you think of graffiti?
In general it just looks like vandalism to me. Okay, every once in a blue moon you get a Haring, Basquiat or Banksy, but you know… hardly ever. Mostly it’s crappy blobby spray-painted messes that only serve to make neighbourhoods look shabby.
I guess when a building is abandoned, like the one in the before & after pics on the left, and its windows have already been covered over with layers of tacky posters, it’s not any worse to have a couple of guys from a local gallery come and paint that over with their website logo. But many shop and restaurant owners would have to repaint their properties on a weekly basis just to have clean walls for a day or two.
So I was surprised to come across Alexandra Del Bene the other day while on my way home from a walk around the Alameda. She was busy with spray cans and paint brushes painting the window protectors of the Santa Marta Bar (home of Sevilla’s largest flamenquín!), but it looked to me as if she were doing a job and not just a hit and run burst of “artistic expression”, so I stopped and asked if she’d been commissioned to paint the Santa Marta. Turns out that a lot of people have been commissioning her to paint their storefronts so that they won’t get vandalised by roving so-called “graffiti artists”, who curiously don’t vandalise Alexandra’s stuff. I guess it’s a sort of professional courtesy?
Alexandra showed me her business cards, which are decorated with pics of her various projects, and it turned out that one – a candy store – was just around the corner, so I also got a snap of that one. Anyhow, we had a nice long chat and it struck me how much more interesting life is when you stop and talk to people instead of just walking by.
casa azahar 
Interesting and humbling.
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Why humbling?
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I don’t like tagging. It’s just so plainly destructive and boring too, like a dog peeing on a post. So much graffiti, even the more complex stuff, looks the same to me. It might be more interesting if there were more variety of expression.
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I don’t have so much of a problem when it is a rusting factory hulk or abandoned railway car. I DO have a problem when it is someone’s car, house, business or historic or building with age. I object to the “tagging” aspect when someone slaps their initials on a building or mailbox.
If it isn’t on one of the types of property mentioned above and is something with some artistic merit, then I don’t have an enormous problem with it EXCEPT to say that, for the most part, people who do graffiti like to THINK of themselves of Banksy or Haring but they aren’t. They are vandals.
I have photographed some of the interesting pieces I have seen on railway cars.
http://public.fotki.com/Mudhooks/my_stuff/year_in_photos/2009/rc/
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I agree, on someone’s car, houses etc it is no good manners; in some more or less abandoned places it brings a bit of color and sometimes really good designs.
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I really like public art, when it really *is* art, as Alex’s is.
I also like your comment on talking to people instead of just passing them by. I do it all the time, and it was one of the things my friend Bob and I did all the time, on our walks. People really are quite interesting; you never know what you can learn until you talk to them, random strangers or not. 🙂
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Nice work
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Think I’m with others here – generally speaking it is vandalism. For me lots of tagging etc tends to make something look (even more) dreary.
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Yeah, kind of like hanging laundry on the outside of a building – same sort of look.
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Miss Tic is another successful street artist, from Paris this time:
http://www.missticinparis.com/
A series of postal stamps drawn by here were issued last Tuesday for International Women’s Day:
http://www.missticinparis.com/misstic_timbres_lemonde_23_02_2011.html
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Of course, I find it rather dismaying that city fathers are more than happy to fall all over themselves to allow monstrous ads to cover the fronts of buildings and public buildings (like New Yorks’ Time’s Square, London’s Piccadilly Circus and Toronto’s Young/Dundas Square, amongst other places.
It was one thing in the heyday of neon ads but now buildings are completely hidden by by hugs ads and display screens and crap. People are dwarfed by them and, face it, they are ads, not artworks. I don’t need or want to see 40′ pictures of some scrawny 20-something in his underwear while sightseeing or even on my own city streets.
Somewhere buried under many of these ads are beautiful old buildings. In many cases, beautiful old buildings have been deemed expendable so that cities can “benefit” by trading off human-friendly spaces for the sake of millions of dollars in the pockets of big business.
They’ve been talking of tearing down the old train station in Ottawa’s downtown because the land is “valuable”. I think the train station is “valuable” because of its history and architectural interest.
Already, the city permitted the transformation of the hotel/conference centre complexes backing onto the Rideau Canal (one of the UNSECO World Heritage Sites) into one of those “squashed can” architectural monstrosities which overwhelms the canal and the road that backs onto it. I’m sure that when the architects presented the plans, they did so in a way that misrepresented the just how much this building would overwhelm the humans and how much it would overwhelm the space. But money talks. The fact that the conference centre was underused BEFORE the transformation seems lost on the city decision-makers. Now that it is bigger and more overwhelming will it be used MORE?
Prior to the remodelling, there were problems with traffic during rush hour because there was inadequate space for tour buses to on and off-load passengers and they had to block traffic on a main commuter route. Have they dealt with THAT problem? No. It looks like they made it worse. And who will suffer so that someone can make money? The people who actually LIVE here.
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I’ve dealt with graffiti before. I even had my car tagged many years ago. I felt violated.
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