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Taggers have sprayed graffiti on 27 stories of a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper
- williamcotton 3y agoI’d rather look at some ornate tag than a billboard. Extra points for actually bombing a billboard! I didn’t choose to decorate my neighborhood with either. The real blemish on the cityscape is a half-finished luxury condo building, not the colorful paint job.
- willcipriano 3y agoYeah the real problem with the city is all that city.
- ben_w 3y agoYou don't need billboards for something to count as a city.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoCase in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoYep, perfect city lol https://www.numbeo.com/crime/in/Sao-Paulo https://www.numbeo.com/crime/in/Sao-Paulo
- ben_w 3y agoNobody even tried to claim it was a perfect city, whatever "perfect" is supposed to mean. It's just an example of a city with no billboards, no more, no less.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago... Does crime invalidate São Paulo's status as a city?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bko 3y agoSure, if you own the building, you can have it tagged however you want. However this is a property rights issue. When you accept some form of lawlessness or disregard to property, you can bet that it won't stop there. Who's to say your car doesn't need a colorful new paint job?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- weinzierl 3y ago"Sure, if you own the building, you can have it tagged however you want." Your HOA might disagree.
- RestlessMind 3y agoBecause HOA owns that community. So "if you own the building" condition is not met, by definition.
- Tostino 3y agoThat's not how that works. At all.
- JohnFen 3y agoIt kinda is how it works in practice. Seeing most of my friends who bought houses governed by an HOA constantly struggle with them has convinced me that HOAs are evil and should be avoided at all costs.
- RestlessMind 3y agoThat's pretty much how it works here in norcal. HOA owns the land under the community, the common places etc. Only thing a "homeowner" has control over is from "everything inside from color of the walls onwards".
- oh_sigh 3y ago
- pxmpxm 3y agoI'm sure you'll feel the same when someone paints "vote Trump" on your house.
- buran77 3y ago> the colorful paint job There may be a discussion about whether painting on someone else's things is justified or not, and in which cases. But another thing is that tagging is really the lowest form of graffiti, barely any "art" in it, certainly no creativity. It's usually the same low effort, low complexity "stamp" repeated over and over again by the same group. Where's the art in that? Because there's certainly vandalism.
- bondarchuk 3y agoHave a look at the article, they're actual pieces (I believe the kids call them).
- buran77 3y agoOf course I looked, I'm a big fan of (sanctioned) street art and was expecting to see 27 stories wonderfully engulfed in a creative dreamworld. Searching for "graffiti pieces" on your hint turned up some quite skillful pieces, nothing like 90+% of the tags in the article. Does anyone consider the words "SOUP" written in blue letters and pink contour (top left title picture), or "AKDE" in all black bold letters (top right), or plain white lettered "LOSTKA" (second picture middle), or the absolute jumble of plain green text right next to it as anything other than low effort spraying of paint on a wall? Nobody presumes some guy shouting in the park is a talented singer and the shouting is quality art. And someone kicking in your door wasn't actually a ballet dancer performing their art. Tagging your name or your crew on a wall is nothing different. People want their name on a wall because it makes them feel important or memorable. They are neither, and this "tag" art is in the same vein as someone drawing dicks on the side of library books. Low effort, low skill, just making the real artists look bad in the name of some short lived boost of ego and self-importance. Some decades ago I organized in my adoptive home town several yearly "celebrations" that were a combination of book-fest, food-fest, and street-art-fest. As a thank you for organizing this I was always invited to put my own "art" on the walls. Due to my distinct lack of talent in this area it was limited to a tag-style signature in a corner of some real art. So I managed to do the same level (albeit slightly smaller scale) of street art as these taggers with no preparation and two left hands. It was a punchline against the incredible art the others put on there. Random internet examples [0]. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=graffiti+art&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=graffiti+art&iax=images&ia=images
- 4gotunameagain 3y agoYea but unilaterally imposing your sense of aesthetic to everyone else ? I do not find those graffiti attractive. It is not art, like a huge beautiful wall mural, it is rather the human equivalent of dogs peeing on trees to mark their territory.
- bondarchuk 3y ago>unilaterally imposing your sense of aesthetic to everyone else ...is what billboards do as well. And certainly they have more nefarious purposes than just "marking territory" or getting cred or just showing off your skill at writing stylized letters.
- anon291 3y agoI completely agree with you. If a billboard company puts up a billboard against the property owner's will and then claims they can't take it down because it's their preferred form of art, and it's really truly their right to place billboards wherever they want, I believe the company should be dissolved, its executives jailed, and the proceeds of the asset sale distributed to those wronged. Now lets apply the same standard to graffiti.
- bondarchuk 3y agoFor me it's not so much about the property owner who owns the place where the billboard or graffiti is put up, but the people who are forced to look at it when they walk around town. From that perspective I think graffiti and billboards are about equally lacking in free choice on the part of who has to look at them, and billboards aim to manipulate you, grab as much attention as possible, and make you spend money, while graffiti is mostly just sitting there. So as long as cities are full of billboards I will never complain about graffiti.
- RestlessMind 3y ago> but the people who are forced to look at it Those people have rights to vote for politicians, or run for local offices, who control such billboards. They should exercise those rights.
- spicyusername 3y agoI think I'd rather have neither.
- keiferski 3y agoI'd rather look at neither, and describing sloppy name tags as "art" is an affront to the concept. Why this is such a difficult position for people to take, I don't understand. I guess everyone has to either be for or against something, without any sort of nuance possible.
- pipes 3y agoNot liking the look of something does not give you the right to alter how it looks. That's a dark path set off on.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoHow do you feel about people illegally exerting their aesthetic opinion about your property?
- Mo3 3y agoOpposite of the crypto.com arena. Lol
- averageRoyalty 3y agoIdiocracy came true.
- dvh 3y ago[flagged]
- spuz 3y agoThe LAPD have said the graffiti will eventually be removed which seems rather pointless for a building that is probably eventually going to be torn down before it's finished. https://twitter.com/LAPDCentral/status/1752850179680768313 https://twitter.com/LAPDCentral/status/1752850179680768313
- Freak_NL 3y agoIt's all about creating the appearance of wasted effort on the side of the taggers, possibly sprinkled with a little political nudging to stop highlighting that specific bit of failure. I hate tagging done in places where people obviously care about the building the walls are part of, but in this case it's hard not to see this as a public service: “Look at this hubris. Hard to ignore now isn't it? A huge newly built tower abandoned for all intents and purposes. It's a waste of space, money, and it raises questions about sustainability and fairness.”
- vdaea 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
- drewcoo 3y agohttps://psychcentral.com/health/broken-window-theory#broken-windows-theory-simplified https://psychcentral.com/health/broken-window-theory#broken-...
- s1artibartfast 3y agoNow rebut the idea that condoning the breaking of windows and laws has a negative impact. The connection between supporting broken windows, and those who break them is a lot more direct. >The real blemish on the cityscape is a half-finished luxury condo building, not the colorful paint job.
- pxmpxm 3y ago
- tamaharbor 3y agoGraffiti is so 1970s.
- apapapa 3y agoNot if you paint a QR code....
- user3939382 3y ago“Is it nice or is it bad?” asks the article then immediately links to an article under “More to read” about gunshots coming from the same building the day after this article was written.
- crotchfire 3y agoPay no attention to the banking crisis... there is no banking crisis... riiight. Apparently this building is also a target pratice range: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-02-03/lapd-investigating-gunfire-at-graffitied-skyscraper-in-downtown-l-a https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-02-03/lapd-inv...
- pxmpxm 3y agoThat's gonna be what, $100k plus to clean it up?
- apapapa 3y agoBreak the windows and poof they are gone? I'm somewhat kidding...
- isoprophlex 3y ago> If someone tried this at Art Basel, it would sell for millions. If Banksy pulled off a project of this scope, he’d be hailed as a genius. Only, if it were a Banksy, it'd be throught-provoking, good looking art, instead of these gaudy, multi colored balloon letters
- StopTheTechies 3y agoReally? I think it adds much more to a city's character than Banksy's hokum. I'd happily pay to put this up across my local skyline.
- zoky 3y agoYeah, says someone who doesn't live in Los Angeles. The only character this kind of crap adds is the kind of shady character that makes me not want to walk around Downtown at night. LA has been getting worse and worse. The Westside has been pretty much given over to drug addicts and the criminally insane. The Valley is rapidly suffering the same fate. The only reason this sort of thing even exists is pure neglect, plain and simple. If your property doesn't mean enough to you to either finish it or sell it to someone who will, then maybe you have no business owning it in the first place. Wanna bet that this property is owned by Chinese interests that don't give two shits about this city? Oh wait, that's literally in the article. What a shock.
- tomjakubowski 3y agoDon't think you can speak for all city residents. I've lived in DTLA for eight years, across the street from another abandoned building. The whole time it's been graffitied from floor to roof. Like OP, I enjoy the artwork just outside my window.
- zoky 3y agoI mean, I believe you, because obviously people don’t care enough about petty crime that LAPD doesn’t do crap about it (and yes, I admit that’s a cheap target, I really mean the LA City Council and more broadly, the LA County Board of Supervisors). But would you be okay admiring that art while walking around at 11:30 PM to get a gallon of milk? If so, please let me know exactly what street you live on, because speaking as a USC graduate who has lived in the LA area for the better part of four decades, I sure as hell wouldn’t.
- jgalt212 3y agoLock up the vandals, and throw away the key. Of course that's flip, but I'm a big believer in broken windows policing.
- draw_down 3y ago[dead]
- the_third_wave 3y agoSeeing this makes me wonder when these "artists" start realising they can use drones to put their "tags" on all those nice big flat unreachable areas high up on buildings. Am I glad I don't live in a city. Around me the only "tags" are left by territory-marking animals of the non-human kind.
- draw_down 3y ago[dead]
- bradfa 3y agoIt makes LA look more like the sci-fi I grew up reading! Funny how the world works and how accurate old sci-fi was.
- hasty_pudding 3y agoThose were 'dystopias'
- hasty_pudding 3y agoSheltered clueless people dont realize how disrespectful this is.
- MSFT_Edging 3y agoDisrespectful to who? Large capital holders who create blight?
- soumlaut2 3y agoPretend you like your job, your area, and your community for a moment - you come into work one day and you find out that someone had tagged your dumpster. Does it only degrade trash corp llc? Or you do you feel an effect? Does it echo outside your company, how do your neighbors perceive it? Someone drives past, that has no overlap all at with any of those factors.. they're gonna have an internal reaction too. I guess if someones a fan of burning society down you can make a pitch that there's some progress being made by someone spraying their tag handle on some symbol of capitalistic structures.. but I have a hard time seeing depth of meaning from an act that's usually ego-driven(tagging).
- mustacheemperor 3y agoBut a dumpster is a complete and functional item. I think that's a key distinction. This is an incomplete high rise blighting the landscape until it's taken down. What if you like your job, your area, and a developer shows up one day and installs 2/3rds of a dumpster in the parking lot. There is a partially completed trash enclosure there, clearly unfinished, blighting the view from your office. If someone drives past, they're not going to get a positive impression whether it's painted or not. If someone paints the wreckage of the incomplete dumpster, how do you feel about it? It seems to me the disrespect here is really from the people who built a pile of garbage in your parking lot.
- MSFT_Edging 3y agoIf I like my community and some large scale corporate developer came in, badly managed a project, and left a half finished building in the place where some useful buildings were once, I'd probably be pro-tagging it. That's the community in action, not some development firm who would mostly act as an extraction tool to siphon money out of the community once it was complete.
- _boffin_ 3y agoThis would be an awesome coffee table book. Each page a separate tag and also several pages of high quality shots from various angles showing the building, parts of the building, surrounding areas, etc... interviews with some of the taggers. I would purchase this and would love to have something like this.
- latchkey 3y agoEveryone is focused on the graffiti and not on the fact that these skyscrapers are sitting there unfinished and empty for years because of poor management. That is the real story here. You normally see stuff like this in developing countries... not in the middle of one of the largest cities in America.
- oh_sigh 3y agoWhat exactly is the story? "These people suck at building buildings"? Surely, the incompetent managers wish they didn't screw it up and turn their idea into a money pit.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- neonate 3y agohttps://archive.md/ciRbI https://archive.md/ciRbI
- yeknoda 3y agoDeath penalty.
- roughly 3y ago> Even Kevin de León, the city council member who represents downtown, emerged from his hiding hole on Groundhog Day to tell KTLA Channel 5 that Los Angeles should not be an “open canvas [for] budding artists.” I don’t know de León, but I see he’s got the conservatives’ gift for describing his opponent’s desired world in the coolest possible way. “Taco truck on every corner” vibes here.
- fngjdflmdflg 3y ago>Instead, the taggers took it upon themselves to transform something ugly into something far more vibrant. Isn’t that L.A. at its finest? >[...] >More to Read >LAPD investigating gunfire at graffitied skyscraper in downtown L.A.[0] [0] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-02-03/lapd-investigating-gunfire-at-graffitied-skyscraper-in-downtown-l-a https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-02-03/lapd-inv...
- Dig1t 3y ago>If Banksy pulled off a project of this scope, he’d be hailed as a genius. Right, Banksy's work usually has a message or some intellectual content embedded in it. These are just inscrutable letters that have no meaning. The building does have a pretty Cyberpunk look to it now though I guess.
- kevinsync 3y agoI'm late to this discussion, but for what it's worth, these aren't gang tags, and there's nothing tribal or territorial about it -- a bunch of known writers just got up on a derelict, piece of shit building [0] because it's there, it's an eyesore, and they could. Actual gang tags [1] have arguably no artistic value and serve a very different purpose. Anyways, just wanted to point out the distinction -- discussions about the morality of it are a separate topic. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanwide_Plaza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanwide_Plaza [1] https://www.instagram.com/fxckyourhood https://www.instagram.com/fxckyourhood