I am always struck, whenever I take the Eurostar train to Paris, as I did this morning, at how much graffiti there is on the walls near the railway tracks and on the sides of the often ugly buildings that sit next to the tracks near Gare du Nord. Some of the graffiti is in fact rather well done, even rather amusing. Here is a collection of the sort of stuff you can come across in the French capital.
Of course, graffiti is an assault on property – the assault is part of the thrill for those who do it – so beyond issues of whether the daubs are ugly or not, it is something that a liberal respectful of property and boundaries will be interested in. Even if I see a clever piece of graffiti, it makes me angry that someone’s property, on which attention might have been lavished, has been defaced. In the case of privately owned property, the offence is clear and obvious: spraying graffiti on the side of your house, say, is the same, in terms of the assault on what is yours, as spraying paint on your face. With public buildings paid for by taxpayers, my view is that taxpayers are entitled to expect that, assuming they have to be forced to pay for buildings at all, that the buildings are respected and kept in good condition, and not disfigured. I suppose some folk of an anarchist type might feel that defacing public buildings is a way of protesting against such things, although I have never seen a piece of graffiti with any slogans on it that might have appealed to an individualist anarchist like Lysander Spooner or Benjamin Tucker, say. If I see an item of graffiti saying that “taxation is theft” or that “the state is not your friend”, I’ll be sure to try and photograph it.
On a related point, I have to say that the Eurostar terminal at King’s Cross St Pancras in London knocks the spots off its Paris counterpart. What a magnificent building. For once, old London town has its French rival beat when it comes to sheer architectural magnificence.
A long time ago, my local in Pittsburgh had such good grafitti and artists that we used to have sneak tours assisted by members of each sex so grafitti could be compared in theirs and ours 🙂
The grafiti on the walls around railway tracks in Paris is property damage (though quite artistic property damage) but the grafitti you see on the metal shutters of shops in some of the less salubrious areas is not. That grafitti is usually comissioned by the owner of the premises in an attempt to prevent their shopfronts being ‘tagged’ willy-nilly with something that the owner is not happy with. There is a code of honour among grafitti artists (those who are artists at any rate) that where one has ‘tagged’, no other will ‘tag’.
This could all be a load of balls but it is what I was told by a denizen of Paris when there for a weekend a few years ago.
Despite what is often said about the cleanness and smartness of Continental cities, they often seem to have us beat on both the squalor of peripheral estates and the amount of graffiti. I remember being struck by both on the railway approach to Malmo in supposedly squeaky-clean Sweden.
@PeterE That’s because they regard graffiti completely differently to your average Briton. We see it as a plague, they do not. A British politician once told me of a fact-finding trip to Italy. She gave a speech thanking them for everything she had learned and suggested Britain could teach them about anti-graffiti measures. They were completely bemused, to them it is not a problem to be tackled.
St Pancras is magnificent, but London is not alone in this regard. There have been many magnificent railway stations (either new or completely rebuilt as at St Pancras) built in Europe in recent times in order to suit the requirements of new faster and longer trains. As examples, I would mention Antwerp Centraal (in which an all new through station has been basically built beneath an existing terminal station) and Lille Europe (all new through station). I hear that Liège Guillemins is also magnificent, but I haven’t seen that one yet. The nicent all new station in Europe is probably Berlin Hauptbahnhof, which was also built because the division of Berlin had left the city with a number of inadequate and outdated stations rather than any modern central station. Berlin also had a number of inadequate and outdated airports rather than a modern airport, also. The new airport will be very impressive when they finish this, too. It will be even more impressive if they can actually get Lufthansa to use it as a hub.
There are cases here like what Mandrill mentions: an owner will commission some work or at least give permission or let it slide.
And then there are a few cities in metro Denver that will charge said owners with ordinance violations for allowing it or failing to clean it up. Apparently, in certain places all walls and fences belong to the city.
(There is a special place in sociofascist hell for the city councils of Arvada and Westminster. Between this and the exercises -or abuses- of eminent domain on behalf of Wal-Mart I refuse to even shop in either city any more.)
Sounds like Arvada has changed a lot since I was shooting pool with engineers and ranchers at a bar there in 1976…
Graffiti does indeed evidence a ‘mindset’ that is shabby, shoddy and presumptuous.
But the best piece I ever saw was in the early days and it did get me thinking. It was:
“Why vote? It’s a double X”.
“Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere”
St. Pancras is very fine apart from that bloody statue. Someone pinched one of Henry Moore’s a while back; can’ t they have a go at the one in the station? It must be worth its weight in…er…scrap.
We are rather fond of our Graffiti here in Bristol, it being the home of Banksy.
300,000 people came to see his exhibition at the Museum last year.
Like Mandrill and Sunfish say, a lot of our local graffiti is commissioned.
Montpelier railway station, the Toilets in St Andrews Park, just round the corner, Herbert’s bakery, my barbers, I could go on and on.
Even Private houses are doing it round here.
I take Johnathans point on property damage, but I cant see many examples in his shots where the graffiti has not actually enhanced the attractiveness of the buildings and walls.
Like the New York subway in the 70s, I thought that the graffiti was an improvement over the slate grey trains.
Many years ago, on the south cutting wall going out of BR Paddington, somewhere about Notting Hill I expect, there was a famous graffito, in 2-foot-high sans-serif type, white on brick:-
“Far away is here and now in images of elsewhere.”
Peter Simple used to opine about it regularly.
One forther down towards Bristol from it said “Dresden”, I noticed. (Different typeface, paint yellower.)
In 1969, we noticed “Elendil the Tall Lives” (and other Tolkien-related rebuses and even quite advanced glyphs, on Balliol wall facing St Aldate’s. You could not miss them, for it faced Beaumont Street as you walked up from Worcester. They and derivatives persisted for about nine months despite the efforts of Balliol porters and other staff to remove them.
Chalk, white and coloured, was the favoured medium in those far-off days. Spray-paint probably had not been invented, I do not know.
Later, just after “Bloody Sunday”, on Keble, appeared:-
“13 dead”
A couple of days later, various people not unknown to myself added:-
“600 to go”
Graffiti are not always functionless, indeciferable scrawls indicating either nothig at all but a void, nor are they sometimes without politico-philosophic merit.
“a lot of our local graffiti is commissioned.”
Then by definition it’s not “graffiti”; it’s simply outdoor art.
Dont split hairs laird. It’s a style thing. People pay for a proper job before they get a crap one done for free on their building with a large blank wall, by tag morons.
Do you remember the George Davis is innocent graffiti that was all over London in the early 70s David?
He was a bank robber by the way y’all, but his friends and relatives got up a campaign to get him released, cos the old Bill had allegedly fitted him up.
They suceeded.
A while later George was arrested again for an armed robbery.
Some wag altered one of the old George Davis is innocent signs to read…
George Davis is innocent this time as well, honest!
It was not my intention to “split hairs” (not that I’m above that!). Seriously, though, “graffiti”, by definition, is the defacement of someone else’s property without the owner’s permission. The key word is “permission”, and without that it doesn’t matter how clever or attractive the defacement may appear to some, it is still improper (actually, criminal). Commissioned artwork, even if it affects the style of graffiti, is fundamentally different because it is consensual. Conflating the two concepts adds nothing to the discussion, and in fact seriously hampers it. If we’re going to communicate words have to have commonly accepted meanings, otherwise it is mere bleating.
“…my view is that taxpayers are entitled to expect that, assuming they have to be forced to pay for buildings at all, that the buildings are respected and kept in good condition, and not disfigured.”
Sorry Jonathan, but the idea that tax-payers are “entitled” to anything is a ridiculous concession to the mirage of government legitimacy. What about when the graffiti is drawn/written by taxpayers on taxpayer-funded property? Why should the wishes of some taxpayers trump those of others?
Mike, the taxpayer is at least entitled to the fact that if he or she is going to be forced to pay for a building, that building should not be trashed. If folk want to get rid of tax-funded buildings, then do so without behaving like a yob. Of course, I am against such tax-funded buildings in the first place, but we are not in a libertarian utopia, so I’d rather that the buildings that we have to pay for are not disfigured.
BTW, I wonder how even the most ardent minarchists or anarchists would feel about a tax-funded monument, such as a memorial to dead soldiers, being defaced by grafitti. In my experience, the sort of characters who like to deface buildings seldom worry very much about the finer points of political philosophy or property rights.
My all-time favourite graffito was spotted by my Dad back when I was still at school, on a wall by the railway going out of Paddington station:
How many readers attempted to do as the artist told them, is a question which must remain forever unanswered.
Mike, the taxpayer is at least entitled to the fact that if he or she is going to be forced to pay for a building, that building should not be trashed.”
Whether graffiti results in a building being “trashed” or “disfigured” is usually a matter of taste (one in which I may be very likely to agree with you, but still that doesn’t entitle you to use words like “entitled” in the context of taxpayer funded buildings). The taxpayer is entitled to nothing – other than the rightful return of the values stolen from him by other men.
“BTW, I wonder how even the most ardent minarchists or anarchists would feel about a tax-funded monument, such as a memorial to dead soldiers, being defaced by grafitti.”
Speaking for myself: disgusted. But that doesn’t entitle me to anything except my own emotional expression – which could take the form of abusive graffiti on the perp’s council house (assuming it is such).
So let’s split another hair, then.
Dale,
All I can say is, “what a difference a day, or 12050 of them, makes.” This isn’t the same state as the one whose governor campaigned against the Olympics coming here. (Mayor Hickenritter campaign against the Olympics? HA!)
Unfortunately, I think we’re Wyoming’s future too. A pity…if Cheyenne or really anyone up there were hiring I’d happily give up my green license plates for another few decades of sanity.
YADATROT:
Let’s say that each person in this thread owns a share of ACME Widgets, inc. And we all get rich selling dynamite to Wiley E. Coyote. Up until mike decides to graffiti the hell out of the front office with pro-Roadrunner propaganda.
And why not? He’s part owner, is he not?
I see that as being analogous to the “government buildings” situation. To me, it’s obvious that a government building is owned by the people who fund that government and are subject to its laws and etc. However, that’s a lot of people sharing ownership, and it seems[1] obvious that multiple owners for one piece of property would mean that the owners acting as a group would have a perfectly reasonable power to limit the uses that any one of them could put to the property.
If 50%+1[2] of the various part-owners couldn’t do that, then it would become difficult to convince multiple people to pool resources, knowing the risk that any one of them would be free to damage or deplete those resources without the approval of the other owners.
[1] to me, anyway. Let me jump in with “Yeah, Sunfish, you would say that you statist goon!” to save someone else the trouble.
[2] Or 2/3, or 3/4, or all-but-one. Nothing especially magical about a majority as opposed to a supermajority or a plurality.
As to the “multiple ownership” argument, I suppose it depends upon whether the proper analog is to a cooperative or a condominium. If the former, we all own an undivided fractional share, so the majority (or supermajority) would rule, as Sunfish says. If the latter, than we each own a tiny individual piece (excepting the common areas), in which case the graffiti-ist* is free only to desecrate only his own (very tiny) portion (which of course assumes that he actually pays taxes and thus does own some share). Either way, it’s wrong to deface the entire property.
* I refuse to accord any such person the dignity of calling him a graffiti “artist”.
“I see that as being analogous to the “government buildings” situation.”
I suppose it could look that way with roadrunner dirt in your eye, but then you’re a bit slow telling violence from reason when your employers are involved aren’t you?
“If 50%+1 of the various part-owners couldn’t do that, then it would become difficult to convince multiple people to pool resources…”
What’s the difference?
What’s the difference?! One is a voluntary arrangement between multiple parties acting for a common value choice (a dynamite factory) and one is an arrangement into which multiple parties are coerced irrespective of whether they share a common value in the venture or not.
“To me, it’s obvious that a government building is owned by the people who fund that government and are subject to its laws and etc.”
The product of my labour, forcibly taken from me to fund the construction of the building is still rightfully mine, but the decision to construct a building say, to house the government’s social security system had nothing to do with me and was not my chosen value. Such a building is in fact violence committed against other values I act for – since the funds it requires from me necessarily deplete the funds I have to spend on my own value choices. I don’t own that building, not even jointly with other tax payers since it was not a value I freely chose and is not a value I would care to maintain.
An analogy: if a bank robber steals my savings from a bank and uses them to purchase jewelry for his trophy wife, yes I’d be fuming and want my savings returned to me somehow, but I would not regard the jewelry as belonging to me. It would be forever “tainted” by the fact that it wasn’t my choice and that its’ purchase was only possible because of violence done to my actual value-choices (i.e. my savings and the purpose I am saving for). Even if the outcome of police work was that the thief was caught and the jewelry was given over to me as “compensation”, I’d be left with the annoyance of having to sell them, likely for a lower price than the savings they represent.
So for me to voluntarily pool my savings with others to run a dynamite factory is one thing; in particular, it is a thing governed by contractual agreement(s) between each party that will most likely prohibit some broadly construed category of “intentional damage” that would cover such things as graffiti (arguments about aesthetic appeal aside). Yet for me to be funding a government building against my will is a totally different thing. If other people’s kids decide to graffiti it into next week, I will more than likely dislike it, but I won’t go around trumpeting about how I am entitled to have the building maintained graffiti-free – especially since the council workers hired to remove or paint over the graffiti cost more of my and other people’s money, and they’ll likely be doomed to an endless cycle of repeatedly cleaning up graffiti.
No, I’d rather just see the land on which it is built bought by private developers to build a dynamite factory or something else completely different.
Mike, not sure what to make of the “road-runner” reference. WTF?
And while I sympathise with the thrust of your response, I still don’t quite buy into it wholesale. l take the view that folk who go around defacing buildings are part of a broader disrespect for property, so even if a building was funded, in whole or in part, with tax funds, I still happen to find grafitti or whatever objectionable. If I have been forced to pay for something, I am not indifferent to the fate of what has been built with my cash. As a second-best option to not having such tax taken from me, the least I can expect is for stuff not to be trashed.
I might as well argue, if we follow your logic, that it is a matter of “indifference” to me if anyone who has ever used a facility paid for out of tax gets beaten up, or has his face scarred by a libertarian vigilante!
A good post J.P.
The roadrunner thing – Sunfish started that, not me. I just popped my Bo Diddley on and tossed it back to him.
Yes I agree: the prejudice that people scrawling graffiti have no respect for property might be on the mark 9 times out of 10. It might be a tax-payer funded building, but it probably wasn’t chosen because it was a tax-payer funded building and hence my property might be next. I have no complaint against this inference.
“I might as well argue, if we follow your logic, that it is a matter of “indifference” to me if anyone who has ever used a facility paid for out of tax gets beaten up, or has his face scarred by a libertarian vigilante!”
No you may not argue this from my point Jonathan – as there is a world of difference between being indifferent toward the defacing of a government building and being indifferent toward the literal defacing of another person. That is an outrageous comparison on several grounds and I would hope you would retract it.
No Mike, I won’t retract it. Defacing buildings, including government ones, is a form of aggression. Well, sometimes people get themselves duffed up because they are seen, rightly or wrongly, to represent the state in some shape or form. Neither of these things are defensible, although clearly beating someone up is far worse than spraying the Cenotaph, although both actions spring from an ugly worldview.
A loss of respect for buildings can often blur into loss of respect for other stuff as well. Hence my point, if perhaps rather clumsily put.
Jonathan: I really can’t quite believe I am having to go through this with you:
First, there is a significant difference between a feeling of “indifference” and going around shouting out about how you are “entitled” to have your preferences against defacement of government buildings enforced with other people’s money.
I may sometimes feel indifferent to the defacement or damage of government buildings that hold little or no value for my life*, but I am very far from indifferent to the defacement of people, first because obviously some of those people may be my customers, colleagues, friends, family etc (or even if they are strangers to me I am still not indifferent to them getting a Glasgow grin – for reasons similar to what has already been discussed). The point is – other people have all kinds of values to me which say, a social security building does not. There is a whole different set of contextual parameters to my valuation of other people than to my valuation of government buildings – that I have to point this obvious fact out to you leaves me bewildered.
“Well, sometimes people get themselves duffed up because they are seen, rightly or wrongly, to represent the state in some shape or form.”
Am I indifferent to State employees being beaten up or shot or something elsed? It depends – bank robbers shooting policemen? No – I’d prefer the bank robbers to be shot. Politicians getting cream pies in their faces? Yes – I can watch that all day long (well, two minutes maybe…) Politicians getting assassinated? Depends how bad the politicians are… but generally assassination is a poor method anyway…. and so I’d likely have mixed feelings.
Your basic error Jonathan is to identify my opposition to tax as the only function in play in any of these equations, when the presence of other values should make it abundantly obvious that there are other functions at work.
But in the original case of tax-payer funded buildings, even though I am often not indifferent to them having been graffitied, I refuse to complain about it and call for more tax-payer’s sums to be spent cleaning it up. I am not “entitled” to have my no-graffiti-on-government-buildings preference enforced using other people’s money and neither are you. If you don’t like it, you can always go and wash it off yourself or pay someone else to do it for you.
*Roads and other essential transport infrastructure being an obvious exception. I want them kept in the best state of repair possible.
Mike, I think I made it quite clear that my analogy was a bit of a clumsy attempt to try to explain why, in my view, if people deface something that is partly or wholly paid for by tax funds, it is not something that those who pay the money can be happy about.
As a rule of thumb, I consider it wrong for people to deface buildings and a sign of a civilisation that is going down the U-bend.
That’s my final point.