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by tichiian 757 days ago
An ugly beton brut building defaces the landscape and the view that should belong to everyone. A beautiful graffiti can improve that view and landscape. Under those circumstances, a graffiti can be legally wrong but morally right.

However only very few graffiti "artists" rise above the skill level where their work could be considered beautiful. Usually it's just plain old dick measuring contests like spraying political slogans and overspraying the opposition's, putting your name on as many places as possible or proving their "worth" in the danger of getting caught, with no aesthetically relevant outcome whatsoever.

1 comments

If it should belong to everyone as you claim, then every aspiring graffiti maker must ask everyone's opinion before starting spraying.
Basically, in my ideal world, whoever builds an ugly enough building should be liable to remove it or improve it if it is deemed too ugly by a majority.

Graffiti is (partially) just the consequence of not living in that ideal world, but because of all the other problems with graffiti, I'd rather just treat it as the vandalism it usually is in all cases. No sense holding an election before every prosecution or clean and paint job.

> Basically, in my ideal world, whoever builds an ugly enough building should be liable to remove it or improve it if it is deemed too ugly by a majority

This sounds like the words of a “community oversight” committee obstructing the construction of housing, and we already know the effects of that on the housing market. Society has swung too far into allowing other people to tell someone what to do with their property already.

In a way you are just debating who gets the power, and saying the people you like should have it. The fact that you or I like someone isn't a reason to give them power.

The buildings have a lot more impact then the graffiti, and arguably should have more community voices involved.

People wouldn't need to outright show they're bigots, they can just vote your house too ugly to be on their street...