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Slightly weird

Two weeks ago, I spoke to a mum and dad in Newcastle who were trying to entertain their toddler in a play area with a cracked slide, and talked about other places nearby now covered in graffiti, and rendered all but unusable.

So we should be cracking down on the tagging crews if graffiti makes a place unusable then?

18 thoughts on “Slightly weird”

  1. Cracking down on the tagging crews implies either more resources for the police, or more funding for after-school clubs to keep idle hands from finding the devil’s work. Not usually your position, Tim.

  2. “…a particularly miserable symbol of that era’s reduced budgets and shrinking horizons: the broken-down, litter-strewn park.

    Slides would be so caked in mud as to make them unusable…”

    Stop dropping litter. Teach your kids not to drop litter. Bring a bucket of water.

    There! Problem solved! ‘Ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community’.

  3. So are they saying that places are unusable because of graffiti? Or unusable AND graffiti’d? A tagged see-saw is still a see-saw.

    Where I live (Melbourne) graffiti is everywhere and though it’s not all good, it is (sorry Julia) generally well regarded. You have to tolerate the shit in order to allow the good stuff.. but if you leave it to graffiti’d answer to ‘market forces’ (respect for the graffiti-ing community) then it can work out ok. People with talent will invest it in doing something good if they think that it will be allowed to exist.

    It’s all a matter of taste though, I accept.

  4. Cracking down on the tagging crews implies either more resources for the police

    Not really. The first person you catch tagging hit with a lawsuit for the cleanup bill of everywhere the same tag appear, which would run into hundreds of thousands (choose the tagger wisely). When the youth can’t pay, hit his parents with the bill. Confiscate their home if they can’t pay, put them on the street. You’d only need to do it once or twice. Rough on the family now forced to live under a bridge, but they can blame kiddo for that.

  5. Funnily enough, I bought some property which had a wall completely covered in graffiti.

    I repainted in white and all the residents around it came out to thank me…

  6. The Guardian complaining about potholes?!! I thought only Tory petrol heads did that? Oh well.

    We are in a sorry state when citizens can’t even be arsed to clean the slides their children play on but insist the Council does it. Pathetic.

  7. Thought gang.

    If that is your wall please feel free to disfiguree it as you wish.

    Touch my wall with a spray can and I will have your testicles off with a blow torch.

    And if it is a communal wall paid for by taxes, as you almost certainly haven’t paid any and I’ve paid losts, see point 2.

    Other than that, spray away old friend.

  8. JuliaM,

    > Stop dropping litter. Teach your kids not to drop litter. Bring a bucket of water.

    Careful, that’s Swedish green talk. Next you’ll be teaching kids to appreciate nature by going for walks in the woods.

  9. @ Andrew M
    The Swedes can’t be wrong *all* the time; they made a fortune out of WWII and stayed the right side of the Berlin Wall.
    I am confident Julia M would take *her own* children for a walk in the woods rather than a regimented class of primary school children who make so much noise that they frighten away all the birds and animals (unless she is energetic and takes them for a walk on a hillside). .

  10. I can’t find the story online, but a few years ago in Glasgow some graffiti artists were asked by the council to do some designs on an underpass wall.

    About a week later a local resident painted over it all overnight. He said that his wall had been vandalised by one of these “artists” in the past so what was sauce for the goose….

    (SQ2 may remember this: it was around the time I think he lived in Glasgow – mid/late 90s?)

  11. Banksy is undeniably talented.

    I’d deny it. When he was trying to sell his stuff as an unknown sidewalk artist in NYC no one was interested. Interesting that your example of the stuff of which we would not complain was the complete “anti-Banksy.”
    I agree on the preview
    😉

  12. “When he was trying to sell his stuff as an unknown sidewalk artist in NYC no one was interested”

    Although there are countless people on sidewalks selling stuff that’s entirely derivative of Banksy… so that’s as much a reflection on the saturation of the market as anything else. Unless you can transport Banksy back and put him on a sidewalk 20 years ago, when his style was somewhat fresher, you won’t get a fair indication of how much the average NYC punter likes his art as oppose to his name.

    You’d get the same effect by disgusing Paul Simon and getting him to play ‘The Boxer’ outside Clapham tube. Obviously everyone would just assume it was just a nice cover, and not the guy who wrote the song. And he wouldn’t sell may CD’s.

    @ Blioke in Italy

    I won’t defend anyone who sprays on a wall he does not own, nor criticise anyone who doesn’t want his own wall sprayed. But I do think it’s the case that non-consensual spraying (ooer) can be good for all concerned. But I am ‘lucky’ in that I live in an area where good street artists want to work, and where a lot of buildings have commissioned art (which raises the standards, and deters shit tagging). I expect that past residents lived through a lot of awful shit before things got to where they are now.

    But on an aesthetic level, I think it looks amazing – and tourists, and property values concurr.

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