Which is more offensive?

[ghostsofgiants]

Graffiti?


Advertisement billboards?

[Heidi]

1. Advertisement billboards.

(With the exception of the old Burma-Shave billboards.) I lovelovelove nearly all urban graffiti, though. :thumbsup:

[ghostsofgiants]

2. Burma-Shave?

Can't say I'm familiar.

But yeah, I love urban graffiti. I wanted to be a graffiti artist for a wile when I was younger, but that shit is hard, haha.

[Heidi]

5. Doesn't kiss you like she useter?

Perhaps she's seen
A smoother rooster!!
Burma-Shave

http://www.fiftiesweb.com/burma.htm

[ghostsofgiants]

6. A little before my time, it seems, haha...

"a set of signs found in the Oregon wine country as late as 1986."

I was one year old at that point, haha.

[Heidi]

7. I'm way too young for them, too.

But I've seen a few and I love 'em. :thumbsup:

[CanuckAmok]

3. I don't mind graffiti, but...

It tends to be so homogenised. I mean, everybody does the same kinds of "Bronx Wildstyle" text and effects that have been around for 40 years. I'd like to be challenged once and a while.

There's a great urban art space here in Victoria. It's the backside of a few warehouses which border on some railroad tracks. The owners were tired of whitewashing tagging off the property, so they invited "top" local graffiti artists to pain the walls, and the only condition was that they couldn't use profanity. Some of the artwork is just incredible, and the nice thing is that none of the local taggers are disrespectful to the artists; they don't deface the art.

[ghostsofgiants]

4. True.

[RandomKoolzip]

12. I've had this same discussion with ChavezSpeakstheTruth (a huge graf fan).

With me arguing YOUR side. I like the more complex graffiti I see, stuff that looks like it took some skill and craft. ANY asshole can take a crayon and scribble something that looks barely legible and "ghetto" at the same time. It's true...too much graffiti is homogenized.

It's like reading the early punk rockers on the beginnings of punk: in the beginning, the idea was to be different than all the other bands out there...If the big punk band in town was political, then YOUR band should be about drinking beer and partying. If Someone Else wore all red, you'd wear black. If the big band in town used synths, you'd use all guitars. If they played fast, you'd play slow.

But after a while, as the scene got larger and larger, all the punk bands started to inculcate a "generic" sound, and because of the sheer number of punk bands, the number of copyists increased. I'm sure there's a lot of great graf artists out there doing original stuff, but there's also hundreds of millions of unoriginal attention whores chicken-scratching their nicknames on any available surface (and damn if I can tell any of 'em apart), which in my opinion, devalues the artform significantly.

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

15. Os Gemeos

The Twins from Sao Paulo

[Initech]

8. In LA, these two things are both one in the same now!

I'm still waiting for street gangs to start spraying Ford and Budweiser logos on walls.

[ghostsofgiants]

9. Haha!

[tjwmason]

10. Depends.

On the one hand graffiti are usually simply defacing property - yet occasionally one does find a graffito which is a genuine work of art.

Adverts are usually just boring, never really reaching either the irritation of bad graffiti messing up the public sphere, or the genuine artistry of good graffiti.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

11. Well, as usual, I am out on a limb here.....

I voted that graffiti is the more offensive....

But it is a close call for me. I went with graffiti since it is so much harder to control.

A lot of it is butt-ugly, and it crops up everywhere. Billboards are, of course, urban blight. But there are rules/regs for them, and they can be artistic. They can be eliminated as well...

Graffiti is not subject to the rules ordinarily, and they mark gang territory quite often.

:shrug:

[0007]

13. The Gin sign is great. Is it photo shopped?

[antigone382]

14. The absolute worst is ad billboards that try to look like graffiti.

Anyone remember that Nissan (I think it was Nissan) campaign? Back then I was traveling back and forth to Atlanta every day for a theatre internship, and there were all these Nissan billboards that had been sprayed over with the name of some website. Turns out, the website was actually a big Nissan advertisement, with a few insipid consumerist poems thrown in to give themselves "street cred." It was the most ridiculous thing ever.

Meanwhile, Atlanta had just enacted new laws that called for the removal of graffiti from all buildings. Now, preventing the unwanted defacement of property is one thing, but according to these regulations, the graffiti had to be removed even if the owner of the building in question approved of it and wanted to keep it there. The only way for a property owner to have a mural or other urban art painted on his or her own wall was to get it officially approved...I think they were even going to require that any artists used have some kind of official license. In other words:

Real urban art by urban artists=distracting blight.

Fake urban art by corporations=creative capitalist endeavor.

[XemaSab]

16. One of the things I saw in South Carolina

(of all places) was many black-owned businesses having their signs done in a graffiti style, with spraypaint.

That's done a little here, mostly with skate shops, etc, but it looks more professionally done here.

Interesting stuff.