[tsimionescu]

No, this is completely wrong. If we own a public structure together, then neither of us has any right to change it except if we both agree to the change. You can't take individual actions on shared goods: you need a process of attaining the consensus of everyone involved (such as voting).

[vasco]

I wonder how you think this works in practice. Do you think the public structures we have and how they look are not just basically whatever aesthetic taste the people we elect have?

Sometimes councils put up several designs to be voted on by the public, but they will largely follow a bunch of design norms that will be whatever the architecture firms they hired think is trendy, for example.

And how many election programs even talk about artistic taste? That's not why we elect people, and making that an election point would be a distraction from real problems, so why not let society be and if people are more artistic in one area and make more public art, let them make it?

[tsimionescu]

While I agree that public control of public buildings is relatively vague in modern times, it still exists to some extent. If a mayor wanted to tear down a beloved building and replaced with an ugly one (as judged by the esthetics of the public in the town), they would face significant backlash and may lose a future election based on that: people in certain places care a lot about the look of their town (and in others, only vaguely).

Even beyond electoral politics, many cities have public NGOs and other organizations that seek to shape this sort of thing from an early stage through various legal means (and sometimes even through civil disobedience, like tying themselves to a building to protect it). If they are broadly in line with the tastes of the people, they tend to thrive; if they are not, they will often die out.

And yes, in certain cities and towns, people actually like the way grafitti looks and are bothered when someone goes and whitewashes a beautifully painted wall. That's perfectly fine, and is a part of the culture and esthetics of that place (and here, destroying the art that people enjoy is an act of violence against the public and/or the artist). But it's also perfectly fine for other places to want neat walls with clean textures, and marring their beautiful walls with grafitti would be an act that goes against the public.

[helboi4]

I concur that sounds really good. That's not how it works now though, which is why graffiti artists reclaim the space as the people that use it. Right now, the space is decided by people in power and with money. Rarely do we ever get real say about how it looks, and we never will. If we did own the public spaces and could make these decisions together, then I'd be down for that, and graffiti probably wouldn't be the same sort of subculture that it is.