huahahaha
love these monologues!!

Now that is really brilliant.. I wonder how long he could go on with this ^^

He should have write each time on a dirty part of the wall, at the end it will have been a whole clean painted wall !!

nice one

jaz’s suggestion could be made by putting the words CHASE ME in different spots at different times, so the buff man has to paint the whole wall, but in a slightly abstract fashion. Or phrases like OVER HERE and BEHIND YOU (British pantomine reference, sorry non-Brits) or better still, if you start the project on a fresh wall, you could get him to paint your name huge by hitting different parts at different times, so his buffing action eventually forms the letters of your name.

you could also buff his buff with a different shade of grey, and see if he buffs it back. that would be an interesting experiment.

see, now this is good. not only has Mobstr made a nice piece/project, but he’s made one that has inspired thought in other people. He’s getting people to use their brains. pay attention kids, as these things (interaction, inspiration, humour) are much more important in street art than being famous and selling thousands of screen prints!

Loving it Genius art

I’d love to see you guys get the buff-painter to inadvertently paint something on the wall … join the dots, so to speak.

Not impressed. Property damage is s all very amusing until you’re the one cleaning up after a juvenile attempt at cleverness.

Maybe it’s funny to some, but it’s also selfish and irresponsible. All the people saying “it’s genius art” etc. might not be so thrilled if it were their aged parent, neighborhood business owner, or good friend who had to waste several days painting over this.

Buy your own wall if you want to paint it, instead of making someone else burn their time and money covering over your work. That’s the difference between an artist and a criminal.

Unfashenomic – the difference between art and crime is ownership? What about when Banksy paints on your wall and transforms it from meaningless brickwork to a piece worth thousands? Does a picture become more beautiful if you own it and less beautiful if it belongs to someone else? Why would you choose to let property relations dictate your relationship with the world. What a sad life you must lead.

“Straw man?” I quoted what you said and answered it. If you don’t have the logic skills to make an actual response, fine. The resort to personal attacks this early on just shows how bankrupt your intellectual position is.

Just answer: would you appreciate an “artistic” face tattoo you didn’t ask for?

If you can come up with a coherent reason why it’s OK to graffiti someone’s wall, but not to tattoo someone’s face while they’re passed out, I’ll admit defeat. However, I’m optimistic that such a coherent reason does not exist — your desperate attempts to evade the point show this.

It’s obvious you like private property just as much as I do, as long as it serves your convenience. The difference is you’re unwilling to take an adult perspective and acknowledge that other people want their property respected as well. I tried to use some analogies to draw out why this inconsistent stance is dangerous, but I guess that’s just “rambling.” I’m not sure where you got the “checking things off a list” thing, as it seems totally unrelated to my argument… It’s possible to be pleasantly surprised, while also not messing with other people’s things. What’s your point exactly?

I’m no die-hard libertarian, and I have no interest in defining art. That is irrelevant to my point, which I will put in caps so you don’t miss it — IT ISN’T FREE OR FUN TO REMOVE GRAFFITI FROM YOUR STUFF. YOU WOULDN’T LIKE DOING THAT, SO YOU SHOULDN’T FORCE OTHERS TO DO THAT EITHER. Unwanted paint on someone’s wall is not genius, it’s not art, it’s not clever. It’s criminal property destruction. I’m not defending “Capital” just basic human decency. If you expect to live in a system where others will not violate your person or private belongings just because they can, you should extend that same courtesy to them. Simple.

Whatever political philosophy you subscribe to, if it can’t account for people’s wants and desires besides your own, it’s not a good one. People who have moved beyond mental adolescence usually understand this intuitively. Maybe it will come to you eventually as well.

My girlfriend will be home from work soon, and I’m sure she’ll be amused to read your cute little attempt at arguing. Take a little longer before your next response, and maybe more of what you say will actually apply.

RJ didn’t find my last post funny and deleted it, so here’s another brief attempt at bowing out of this pointless argument.

Unfashenomic – I genuinely can’t be bothered to get drawn into your patronising spiral of bogus arguments. You are obviously locked into a worldview based around a concept of property and money relations I have no interest or empathy with and which almost certainly puts a price on everything, including public space. If you can’t see a difference between your wall and your face I feel sorry for you. To equate your position with “human decency” would be regarded as little more than a joke by those millions of people around the world excluded either from the fruits of their labour or even from the very means of their survival by your concept of property.

What also makes your position funny is that street art and graffiti is in its purest form a total rejection of the mercenary money-driven art world: no-one has to pay to view it, no-one can own it, it stands outside of and challenges a narrow concept of property ownership. And artists and writers often put their own liberty at risk to put it there. To try to pick an argument about art and crime with graffiti writers is a joke.

How incredibly easy it is for someone who is in the top 1% of the world’s wealthiest people to say that being “excluded from the fruits of their labor” is “Marxist ideology with no basis in fact”. But the cold hard reality of your abstract property relations is people struggling to get by on a few cents a day making consumer products sold for collosal profits elsewhere. That’s THEIR 2 cents.

Unfashenomic: A soldier is worth a thousand artists? Wow.

@ Unfashenomic –

just because you own property does not give you the right to impose blankness and sterile landscape on everyone who has to view it. Anything within view of the public is in practice some type of public “property”. A blank wall is begging to be filled. If you don’t want someone to paint on it, paint on it yourself.

There is no reason why painting something should decrease property values. Beautiful things tend to attract commerce and make people feel better about where they live, or communicate things that make people think and therefore contribute meaningfully to democratic society. If you think something is ugly or related to crime somehow, get a paint can and paint it yourself.

I enjoyed the comments more than the actual article.

Name something you thought Marx got right. Then we’ll talk. His most essential prediction, that capitalism would necessarily collapse and evolve into socialism, has been completely backwards as formerly communist nations are now converting to free markets.

I’m glad you agree state socialism is bad, but what other kind is there? Socialism, by definition, is ownership of production by the state; every socialism is therefore state socialism. Ownership “by the people” is just a rhetorical ruse, which can only be accomplished through a powerful state.

I’m not defending any government’s record. It’s unfortunate that the USA didn’t better foresee the consequences of its actions. The Vietnam war was unnecessary, as we could have just waited for socialist governments to collapse on themselves. That doesn’t excuse the millions killed by Pol Pot. Had those socialist ideas not been as popularly accepted, the outcome may have been less tragic. Pol Pot was invited to share the image of his ‘worker’s utopia’ globally thanks to “useful idiots” (as Lenin termed it) like you, who admired the outward goals of socialism but had no concept of its inner horrors.

If it’s just the body count you’re interested in, the only belief system that might be able to top the killing record of socialism is organized religion. Both generate self-certainty and refusal to acknowledge difference of beliefs, which makes violence a natural outcome.

Distinction: people working in a factory produce a good which others value; they contribute to the sum of social wealth. A graffiti artist forcing someone to paint over their work wastes time that someone COULD have spent producing something; they reduce the sum of social wealth. The fact that you would conflate these demonstrates how wrong the Marxian labor-theory-of-value is. A product is valuable if others are willing to pay for it, not just because someone spent their time making it. The “work” that graffiti creates is basically the equivalent of digging holes and then filling them back in again.

Yes, you can sell your wall whenever you want. Saying ads “pollute” the view is just your normative opinion. Some would justify advertising to increase the public’s knowledge about a good product, and some ads are quite clever. Again, who are you to impose your aesthetic views on others? If you care so much, pay the owner to display stuff that you like. If you can’t raise enough money to do that, it signals society in general values the previous use of the wall more, and you should leave it be.

Get over it. This isn’t here for a debate about graffiti to start up, it’s merely for the viewers enjoyment and whatever purpose the artist had for doing it. Yes, someone who graffitis, is an artist whether you agree or not. Now get over yourselves.

youre all losers. nobody freaking cares. get over this page and get a life

Dear Haters,

This is God’s wall, not ours. Let his sons and daughters enjoy it

how about this:appreciate art for what it is where it occurs.

when you say that “this is mere vandalism,” you deny any compelling nature that the art and the artist have, just because you feel like they dont respect you and your own property enough. and this borders on self obsession.

instead, id suggest that when art happens, dont try to fit it into your world, let what you see of beauty inform your world. there is a way to resolve your conundrum without property its called open mindedness.

and if someone thought the sistine chapel would look good on my face, id first ask why they think so instead of selfishly denying their intelligence and by extension their importance and everything else about them in the face of the all-consuming “my view”