Humans have always been, and always will be, garbage.
This isn’t garbage, this is good banter.
A bored guy engraving runes at an height of 3.8 meters just to mess with the next guy reading it, an artist or worker sculpting his name into a work, ordered by the class in power (church) just to give the finger to the clergy, Mozart creating a piece to get revenge on the rich class that held him prisoner to work on what was asked to him instead of having liberty to create as he pleased…
Good, old fashioned, rebellion.
I’m talking about the destructive graffiti. That’s not rebellion, that’s shitting things up. It’s why we can never have nice things—because some asshole(s) just have to destroy shit. I love good street art, but that shit is just marking shit up to be an ass. And if you think that shit’s ok, you’re an ass, too.
Tagging is a form of urban cancer on its own. Full stop. But depending on what is writen, the border between reactionism and vandalism blurs.
I grew up in a very urban setting, after a political revolution, and the graffiti on the walls were words of anger, of calling out those who had cooperated with the old regime, slurs, etc.
Every word, line, trace, was disfiguring the buildings, statues and whatever surface it landed on but carried meaning, a message.
The Pompeii graffiti were gratuitous in nature but it was a city and part of a civilization know for being prone to excess. Today, those graffiti are living testaments of our colective history, although not much diferent from common and crude public bathroom scribbles.
