> This seems like a no-brainer, but there are people out there who truly believe that the vandalistic nature of graffiti negates any possible artistic merit. Th

> This seems like a no-brainer, but there are people out there who truly believe that the vandalistic nature of graffiti negates any possible artistic merit. Though my appreciation for graffiti is not unconditional, I tend to take the opposite stance: graffiti’s transgressive qualities only enhance its aesthetic value. It’s art that bursts the seams, demanding that the world bend to it and not the other way around, refusing to comply with the arbitrary bounds of property law—those meaningless slips of paper meant to legally confer ownership of land, buildings, bridges, trains, and anything else that might serve as the artist’s canvas. IMO, this is a complete misunderstanding of why we have rules about who can do what to things. It is true that most of the time, if you actually do a deep-dive, property ownership is arbitrary. It reflects a history of violence, domination, control, power and is rarely rooted in any kind of philosophy that anyone except a sociopath could defend. Yes, of course, there are the empty corner cases - someone makes something entirely by themselves from a resource who supply is not locally or globally constrained, and claims ownership of it based on the labor and conception they put in. But these are tiny subset of actual property ownership situations, and the big picture really doesn't support the sort of claims that propertarians like to make for "the rules". However, it is not meaningless. Most of us do not want to live in a society where anyone can do anything to anything at any time. It can be simultaneously true that the rules we have are arbitrary and unfair AND ALSO that we do want some kind of rules and these are the ones we have right now. So by all means propose, refine, campaign for, enact better rules that control who can do what to what and when and how. But pretending that any such rules are arbitrary and meaningless is destructive and doesn't help us move towards a more equitable (or art-filled) society.