> Since this law was adopted, there's been an increase in full building graffiti, which is not banned. Now 10 years later, it is more likely to see one of these nowadays than an empty outdoor frame
Nearly all of these look like murals, not graffiti (these are distinct forms of street art). Regardless, those photos are beautiful and I'd love to have those instead of billboards in my city.
> Can you elaborate on this? I've always thought a mural was just a type of graffiti?
According to Wikipedia it’s the opposite: a graffiti is a type of mural [1]. However at least in French and in Italian a graffiti is an inscription on a wall, often done as vandalism, while a mural(e) is more like a fresco which often takes the full wall.
As a French, for me this [2] is a mural and this [3] is a graffiti.
My litmus test is "was it asked to be put there". I live in Denver and after we won the NBA finals a local artist put this up this[1] mural and it was coordinated with the business + building owner + local govt. I would call that a "mural" versus "graffiti". Now if you go out to our "warehouse district" you will often see "graffiti", that is stuff the owners never asked for, some kids just showed up and tagged the building in the middle of the night.
They're both graffiti. Graffiti can be beautiful or art to some people or not be. But if the person did not build the building with that mural/art on it to start, or did it at a later date as part of the same project, it is graffiti in the modern sense of the word (in English).
People thinking it is art, or thinking it is beautiful does not remove the aspect of it being graffiti. Even a large advertisement would be graffiti.
I would hate to live in a building that had a huge mural go up after I moved in personally, but that also doesn't make it graffiti or not.
This thread is showing how words have different meanings in different places. In my slice of the world, graffiti is not limited to text. A tag is though.
Graffiti is usually tagging [1], but includes other forms of (non-sanctioned) random acts of art and, especially, writing.
Wall murals are usually sanctioned – either there is permission granted to paint a wall, or, often, they are commissioned. Usually there is only one artist or company that makes the "complete" mural, with much planning and coordination, and no intervention by casual passerby.
In the source below, you can see that though it is wall, it is being tagged (not a mural) with various ad-hoc contributors.
Some would argue that a wall that is purposefully provided as a space for passerby to add their contributions (to add "graffiti" to it) makes it not graffiti at all, since that goes against its anti-institutional spirit. In that view, commissioned wall murals by an artist are distinctly not grafitti.
This seems like a separation that's a little too clean to fit reality. Does that hard line of distinction really exist?
Certainly there are clear examples on both ends of the spectrum, but here's some closer to the boundaries of your definition from my own hometown - I wonder how you'd classify these:
(personally I'd call the sanctioned tags both murals and graffiti, and definitely classify them as art, but I'd only call the ad agency piece a mural; neither graffiti nor art - though I fully acknowledge that last judgement is a subjective one and not something universal)
I'd use my "especially writing" heuristic here to separate the two – graffiti comes from the Greek root "graph" (to write), right? So even though 1 contains elaborate and beautiful full wall pieces, I would still consider them "graffiti," especially because they seem spontaneous productions by citizens (taking back the architecture of the city into their own hands!) and not commissioned by an agency.
The involvement of the ad agency (i.e., an institution of some sort) and lack of writing would make 2 certainly not graffiti, despite the subversion of the law. We could call it vandalism, actually. Beautiful vandalism in the form of a wall mural!
The trickiest to define is something like the Berlin wall – if I'm not mistaken, the city gave permission for anyone to come draw/tag to their hearts' content all along portions of a wall. Does permission make it not graffiti? Some would say yes. Personally, I disagree – if it is writing rather than drawings, I still consider it graffiti, minus any perjorative associations of the word. Grafitti is an art form too.
Yes grandparent is splitting hairs. Mural means wall, graffiti means tracing or drawing. There's probably a few taxonomies out there but they will be arbitrary and the whole point of street art is to get around gatekeepers.
ehh not really, throw ups are different from tags which are different from murals - muruals often aren’t graffiti because they require more time, which tends to require permission
Basically the difference is that the mural is bigger and probably has the building owners consent, but in terms of aesthetics it's a tossup. Most murals seem to be abstract visual noise that is scarcely better than average graffiti, and on the other hand some rare graffiti is far above average. And then there are the murals with a message, which often end up looking like Soviet propaganda posters (or in fact murals, since the Soviets were big on murals too). Huge images of some local leaders linking arms with workers to deliver symbolic world peace or some tacky saccharine sweet bs like that.
If I'm being honest, a lot of these Soviet murals actually demonstrate superior technical skill and aesthetic understanding than the murals in my town (many of which aren't worthy to hang on a mother's refrigerator): https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/10/the-forgotten-soviet-e...
Throw ups are different to tags but I still don't think that explains how graffiti is distinct from mural, unless you're trying to say all graffiti is unsanctioned, which... isn't really the case.
Murals can be without permission as well - a work can be both things. And graffiti can be done with permission - in general, folks are wanting a "street art" style work.
Are building murals not associated with ghettos outside the US? Where I live you know if you start seeing big faces on walls you're in the bad part of town and need to be careful.
It’s not associated with ghettos in the US, either, almost by definition. A mural implies a property owner has usually paid and maintains a piece of art for public consumption. For the mural to survive (no actual graffiti over it) means the community respects the investment and property, too. Ghettos are areas of abject poverty where that sort of community for structural reasons isn’t happening.
Just because the suburbs don’t have murals doesn’t mean that urban areas that do are dangerous.
On the East Coast of the US, I associate large graffiti murals with gentrification, particularly of industrial/formerly industrial neighborhoods. In many (but not all) instances, murals are commissioned or otherwise encouraged as part of "beautifying" those areas.
In San Francisco there are building murals throughout the city. I quite like them!
I'm not sure if there are murals in the richest neighborhoods (Pacific Heights) or the less dense, more suburban neighborhoods (Sunset, Richmond), but there are murals throughout the dense neighborhoods near downtown. (SOMA, the Mission, Haight, etc.)
In Houston there's enough for a website dedicated to them [0], and they aren't at all associated with "dangerous" parts of town. If anything, if you see one going up, you can bet your property taxes are, too.
I have lived in the US (on and off) for decades and have not made this association you describe. It's also common in many European cities, often in middle class neighborhoods.
Palo Alto has street murals scattered around the city in commercial districts and some private homes.
I live in NYC and I associate murals with mainly industrials districts. There are plenty of murals everywhere but if I hit a block that's covered in them I think industrial which I don't associate as a bad part of the city.
A local store or library decorated with a mural of some idyllic park scene is almost cliche here in Canada. Typical is a giant yellow sun and, yes, the obligatory detached smiling heads. I've seen abstract geometric patterns more often lately. Often done by schoolchildren, or for some community social event. Sometimes commissioned with actual artists. Bridges and underpasses, particularly pedestrian ones, are also candidates for murals. Quite a few like that in Toronto.
I suppose it's because residents in the nicer parts of town are very active about not changing the "neighbourhood character" and consequently murals are not permitted unless they're already there.
> Are building murals not associated with ghettos outside the US?
It's two things in the US. It's ghettos, as you say. But more and more it's whites who want to signal that they're "cool" with minority culture, and you see them in economically well off areas.
Almost all of the city of São Paulo is covered in gang graffiti, buildings covered in these rune-like tags from top to bottom. It is extremely ugly, and of course also unsettling since it is a signal on who runs the city.
Those aren’t gang tags at all, they’re quick and easy graffiti (albeit illegal in most cases) that is done by people trying to either fit in or showcase themselves. Most of the murals shown in this thread that are considered “art” were painted by artists who started off doing the Pixo letters. While much loathed and a bit of an eyesore they’re the single most unique thing about the city, nowhere else in the world or even Brazil has anything like it.
The only gang graffiti you’ll see in São Paulo are written in plain letters or numbers (“PCC” or 1533), nothing like Pixo.
Having lived in São Paulo most of my life, I'd like to corroborate this. The groups tagging buildings generally have nothing to do with (other) crimes. The only unsettling part was the time I saw that that the wall below my 6th floor bedroom window had been tagged overnight
> Actually it is the opposite, it is a scream from those who don't really have a voice in the city.
It is most certainly not. This romanticizing of criminals and vandals is not any kind of compassion. Who would like their neighborhood or home turned into a hell scape?
Edit: To those who downvoted my comment, go look up some pictures of how these neighborhoods look when they are all covered in tags. Ask yourself if you would want to live there? But of course it's easy to be such a benevolent and tolerant hacker, when you don't have to live it yourself...
Would you like to look at only buildings and every surface around you looking like the picture above and worse for hours every day for your commute. Because that is the reality for millions of people. Desolation and decay might be a cool photo for traveling hackers to put on their Instagram, but I think it is different when you have to live in it.
I have never heard anybody from São Paulo talk about the delights of this grafitti covering the whole city. I guess they're just uncultured?
Neither murals nor graffiti is art. None of those would have been accepted in any gallery some 30~40 years ago when standards were higher and the world didn't suffer from the high number of grown-up men who are hooked up on comic books and animated cartoons it suffers through today. A lot of it is just vandalism. None of it seems to be made by or for adults. 99% looks like it's made by some comic book fan on LSD. Always the same. Always the same. Always the same. Always the same. Always the same. That's just how shallow they are. I've heard stories of places being pressured or even threatened to cede their spaces to accommodate this form of "art." It's awful all around. Real art is deep, meaningful, timeless and doesn't need to be imposed.
Just so you know, the exact same thing was said about pretty much every major art movement over the past century and beyond. When you say, "None of it seems to be made by or for adults", the same was basically said of Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol and Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. :)
The funny thing is, the classical art of Greece, probably looked much different than how we think about it. It was much more colorful and vibrant, it's just that all the pigment washed away. https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/styles/l...
could be even close to the original ( considering that the Romans generally managed to somehow get skin tones more or less right in the few paintings that survived)
The problem is they do careful analysis of statues and find evidence of pigmentation, but obviously they're only looking at the remnants of the base coat and don't see any of the careful detailing that almost certainly went towards making these statues look very lifelike (judging by the realistic quality of the sculpture itself.) And so the recreations look flat and uncanny because they're essentially unfinished.
The bright clothes are fine, but his skin is awful. It's flat and lifeless, like a cold corpse drained of blood. It looks like they put the primer coat on then left it unfinished; I think that's literally what they did. Maybe this look is what they were originally going for, but I don't think so. Look at the detail on that guy's knees, they look just like real knees. I don't believe the original artists went through so much trouble to sculpt hyper-realistic knees then let some intern half-ass the paint job.
I think it's also current museum aesthetics where they do enough to give you the idea but don't want to take any artistic license beyond what's provable. So the painting could have been more subtle especially for those close to the viewer
The way some of these “reconstructions” look is just plain awful. And based on the surviving examples of frescoes and paintings they would look as just awful the the Romans.
> I think the reproductions suffer a bit because
They suffer because there is no shading for one thing. The skin and hair especially just look awful. It has nothing to do with the bright colors (I get that part).
Those examples have some similarities, but - while they had their contemporary detractors - they were, for the most part, formally educated participants in the art establishment of their times.
I'd liken it more to the works of Henri Rousseau or even maybe the French Decadent movement.
That's not a very good argument. Putting aside the present topic, this argument doesn't address the substance and instead lazily falls back on an association fallacy: "if people said P about A in the past and we no longer think that, and you say P about B, then you must also be wrong". It's the same kind of progressive argument people use when they categorically dismiss any criticism of new music as just the same old hate old people always have for "new things". Boring, dismissive, unthinking, and refuses to consider that there might be valid criticism apart from the crankiness that does, in fact, exist. It assumes as a premise that art cannot be bad, or that it cannot be an expression of cultural decadence, whereas I claim that it can.
And I would actually claim that most Warhol is trash, good swaths of Dali worthless, and both Matisse and Gaugin mixed bags.
The difference is that pieces of art can be bad, but you’re going to have to do a lot more work to dismiss an entire set of categories of art. Even the examples of Warhol, Dali, etc. are individual artists, not an entire medium.
Imagine arguing that there are exactly zero good pieces of software written in JavaScript bc JavaScript is a bad language.
When people say "it's bad so it's not art", they're challenging artistic value, essentially the same as what any art critic does. A cultured art critic who says "this is kitsch crap" and an unsophisticated man off the street who says "this crap isn't art" are both people expressing their dissatisfaction with the work. One expresses his thoughts in a way that is 'technically wrong' if taken literally and the other expresses his thoughts with jargon that is inaccessible to the general public.
As someone who graduated from an art school, let me be another voice here to say that you're absolutely wrong. Art is about intentionality and process. Duchamp and Wahrol are prime mainstream examples of that. The intervention in urban equipment is art. Making it yours, sharing it with the world, the dialectical dialogue between the mural and the surrounding cityscape, there is so much to unpack here.
Also, comic books are art as well. Sequential art has been recognised by everyone with an ounce of heart and one of the main mediums for storytelling. Some even been calling it the ninth art just like cinema is the seventh. It is a medium unlike painting, cinema, or photography, one in which you can do things you can't in any other medium.
I recommend checking out the following books if you want to move past your misconceptions:
- The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin.
- Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud.
- Comics and Sequential Art, Will Eisner.
All those books are quite approachable and engaging reads.
I think your example of Duchamp is incorrect (and I’m an engineer not an arts graduate) Attempting to cast yourself. as knowledgeable and then using Duchamp without understanding his history shows lack of taste IMHO.
Duchamp stole his signature artwork from Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven:
a 1917 letter Duchamp wrote to his sister, Susanne, translated: “One of my female friends who had adopted the masculine pseudonym Richard Mutt sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.”
R Mutt was identified as an artist living in Philadelphia, which is where she was living at the time.
Duchamp said he had purchased the urinal from JL Mott Ironworks Company, adapting Mutt from Mott, but the company did not manufacture the model in the photograph
the handwriting on the urinal matches the handwriting Von Freytag-Loringhoven used for her poems.
I recommend you avoid presenting yourself as an expert on art : or at least try to become more knowledgeable. Second-hand information from experts is often misinformation. Of course: “great artists steal” just usually not quite so literally.
First: I never called myself an expert. I said I was an arts undergrad, there is a difference there.
Second, I never mentioned that urinal. I mentioned two artists that had intentionality and process tied to their work. Duchamp is not just that urinal, please check his other work and the movements he was associated with to learn a bit more about what mechanisms gives the art piece and aura of art. In my opinion, that understanding is quite essential to appreciate certain movements such as Dadaism.
Also, I never mentioned anything about "artists" and stealing.
All I did was name check two very well-known artists whose work is part of a larger artistic revolution, one that precipitated a discussion and a new understanding about "what is art".
I also offered some book references so that instead of accepting my opinion, the OP or anyone else can go read and form their own opinion. Because instead of being an expert, I gave references to the experts.
As usual, gotta trust an engineer to arrive full of opinions and misconceptions about a field that they're clearly not well versed and attempt to put someone down.
Good lord, there is so much more to Duchamp than that urinal. Also, it misses then point of my comment in its entirety. It is about what intention is behind the work, not about the piece themself (a bit more complex than that but that is enough for a small comment).
What intent is in a stolen piece of work presented fraudulently throughout Duchamp's life as his own, and still widely treated as iconic and used as an example of a movement. What value the criticism built upon a lie? There is plenty of unintentional art in this story!
RobotCaleb, kindly explain:
1. Why are you admonishing me and not saying a word to the poster who said "check out the following books if you want to move past your misconceptions"? Why doesn't that come across as patronizing to you?
2. Why is art subjective but "the following books" are not?
3. Where did you get the idea that art is supposed to be inclusive? Kindergarten teachers routinely invited my mother to go there just to show her, "Look at the amazing drawings your son has been making AGAIN!" Do you think my kindergarten drawings should be blown up and plastered on publicly visible walls? Seriously, I want to know.
On point 3, well, yes. If your mother or teacher wanted to, and had the means and opportunity to do so. Whether or not you find artistic merit in those drawings has little bearing on the expression of pride that might drive your parent or teacher to publish that art. It doesn't have any bearing on the feelings that are evoked by the observer, whether it's your revulsion at your own productions, or the delight from normal folks when seeing displays of public art.
You said "Real art is deep, meaningful, timeless and doesn't need to be imposed."
Sand Mandalas are deeply meaningful, but completely timeless - most are created to be destroyed, often within days or hours of completion. Brueghel's Flatterers is a relatively crass, surface level, but lasting commentary on what we often refer to as Musk fanboys and such these days :P
Fundamentally, art is human expression, and your attempts to gatekeep that have fallen pretty flat so far.
You're uninformed about it all being the same. The graffiti in São Paulo has a vast range of styles. I have hundreds of photos I've taken myself. This fine art I can see outdoors is one of the most pleasurable things about living or visiting there.
I studied art in university, am an artist myself, and visit major exhibitions around the world on a regular basis. Much graffiti is indeed valid art.
If you might be an artist then where's your portfolio? There's no links in your profile, zero HN submissions. Put up or shut up.
The NYC gallery scene started bestowing art-ness upon people who became known for the work they painted on the city's walls around... exactly forty years ago, I looked up Kieth Haring as a random example and galleries started showing his work in 1983.
That's not a question for artists, but philosophers of art, which, of course, artists can also do, but generally, most artists are really bad at philosophy.
Art that isn't made to make the lives of those around it better, is dead, or worse. As someone living in São Paulo, those murals are one of my favorite aspect of the city. I love them. Not that it really matters, but those large commissioned artworks are very much how Da Vinci or Michelangelo worked. I have little doubt they would be proud and amazed.
They also reflect the sensibilities and thoughts of the artist in relation to the city and its inhabitants. I love em' :)
I'm not sure if this kind of parody is against HN guidelines per se, but it's less common here than, say, Twitter, and as such is usually customary to add some indicator like "/s" or similar.
Real art is deep, meaningful, largely in the eye of beholder, and far from timeless but always culturally interconnected.
I genuinely don't know if you're trolling, or actually believe what you wrote? If the latter, I'd love to hear more. I vehemently disagree with everything you said but that's no reason to downvote - we learn more from opposing viewpoints, especially if new and hard to comprehend.
> None of those would have been accepted in any gallery some 30~40 years ago when standards were higher
It's funny to see someone wax pretentious about standards in art when they obviously haven't heard of, say, Diego Rivera, and don't know that Haring's heyday was "30 to 40 years ago".
You should have kept your mouth shut instead of embarrassing yourself.
Nearly all of these look like murals, not graffiti (these are distinct forms of street art). Regardless, those photos are beautiful and I'd love to have those instead of billboards in my city.