I don't know which other board to ask this, but since you guys are "/aesthetic/: the board", let me put it here.
Is graffiti a regressive and thus degenerate art form or not? Like a return to cave painting?
>>8006648
Kind of.
"Graffiti" and "Street art" are two different things. People have made decent shit on the sides of buildings and whatnot with spray paint. While technically graffiti, I'd classify it differently (street art).
Continuing in that vein, "graffiti" is writing words on a wall, which can be viewed as narcissistic, regressive, and degenerate since typically you are not making any statement besides "I made this."
Cave paintings were probably the Sistine Chapel for early humans.
Graffiti doesn't really regress to anything in my opinion because it seems to me that people have always done it. It's neither a step forward or step back I guess is what I'm trying to say.
>>8006653
Right. I should have called it "street art" instead of graffiti, since graffiti is more atemporal than street art, with obvious examples already present in Pompeii and before.
>>8006648
Let us turn to the great Austrian architect, Adolf Loos.
From his famous essay, Ornament and Crime:
A child is amoral. A Papuan too, for us. The Papuan slaughters his enemies and devours them. He is not a criminal. But if a modern person slaughters someone and devours him, he is a criminal or a degenerate. The Papuan covers his skin with tattoos, his boat, his oars, in short everything he can lay his hands on. He is no criminal. The modern person who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate. There are prisons in which eighty percent of the inmates have tattoos. People with tattoos not in prison are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats.
The urge to decorate one's face and anything else within reach is the origin of the fine arts. It is the childish babble of painting. But all art is erotic.
A person of our times who gives way to the urge to daub the walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate. What is natural in the Papuan or the child is a sign of degeneracy in a modern adult. I made the following discovery, which I passed on to the world: the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use. I thought by doing so I would bring joy to the world: it has not thanked me for it. People could no longer create new ornament. What? We alone, the people of the nineteenth century, were not capable of doing something every negro tribesman could do, something every age and nation before us had done!?
The Object mankind created in earlier millennia without ornament have been casually tossed aside and allowed to go to wrack and ruin. We do not possess a single workbench from the Carolingian period, but any piece of trash having even the slightest decoration was collected, cleaned up, and put in an ostentatious palace built specially to house it. And we made our way sadly around the showcases, ashamed of our impotence. Every epoch had its own style, and ours alone should be denied one!? By style people meant ornamentation. But I said, 'Do not weep. Do you not see the greatness of our age resides in our very inability to create new ornament? We have gone beyond ornament, we have achieved plain, undecorated simplicity. Behold, the time is at hand, fulfillment awaits us. Soon the streets of the cities will shine like white walls! Like Zion, the Holy City, Heaven's capital. Then fulfillment will be ours.'
Niggroglyphics on the monuments of a dying race.
How could it not be degenerate.
Loos is obviously right, but here's another perspective
ftp://ftp.icm.edu.pl/packages/graffiti/faq/rammellzee.html
Why do leftists not realize when they hail spearcucking ways as fantastic that they're agreeing with right wingers but just giving it a different value statement.
>>8006660
What a splendorous vision.
>>8006653
I feel the opposite. Graffiti, narcissistic and savage as it is, is a genuinely popular "artistic" manifestation and, therefore, is ignored by the media. The trouble comes when some graffiti artists are chosen as an elite (Banksy and shit) by the cultural media to represent a supposed "street art" which ends up being no more than another form of shitty mass culture, naive, simplistic and pretencious products that only interest to pseudocritics or to those who can make money of it by selling calendars and postcards.
>>8006696
>I feel the opposite. Graffiti, narcissistic and savage as it is, is a genuinely popular "artistic" manifestation and, therefore, is ignored by the media.
i am so tired of having to hold my tongue when hipster douches say this nonsense to me in real life so i'm glad i'm on 4chan and i can just say
stop apologizing for the stupid behavior of stupid niggers you patronizing leftist cuck faggot, it's patronizing
The very fact that street art is inherently tied to its deliquency shows its degenerate element, whether you're a fan of it or not. I sure am. But I'm a decadentist and I embrace such things.
In a world where street art would be allowed ( as it is in some gentrified towns ) it is immediately rendered pathetic and not even worthwile. Many would consider it boring. The danger of getting caught is present in the very act of spraying your work on the concrete.
Even among street artists, the walls on which you're allowed to work are usually seen as draft, try-outs, and the actual pieces you'd wanna be proud of you would want on a highway bridge.
Street artists who limit themselves to such legal walls are seen as posers anyways.
>>8006710
I'm not apologizing shit, faggot. I'm just saying it's not intended as art and that's fine, it never should. Just like french recordings of "François is a cocksucker" on egiptian monuments You just cannot read.
>>8006722
This.
The very fact you now have a 'valid art form' in the West which cannot be practised unless you're committing a crime is a clear case of the degeneracy of that very civilization.
And no, art back in the day of Rembrandt and Phidias didn't have all this "imma rebel" crap tied to it, even if it made the cultural fault lines smash, they weren't surrealists dreaming of shooting people in a public place.
>>8006648
>degenerate
When will this meme die?
>>8006648
Linear progression is imaginary
>>8006751
You're a progressivist. Of course you don't believe things degenerate.
>>8006660
>>8006710
>stop apologizing for the stupid behavior of stupid niggers you patronizing leftist cuck faggot, it's patronizing
Stop being a fucking child and stop politicising everything you fuckwit. He's right.
>but muh niggers and leftists
tiresome American shite that doesn't apply to most graffiti
>>8006666
Elaborate.
>>8006648
It was originally a form of detournement, in which the individual subverts and reclaims alien structures created by impersonal forces of state and capital. Even now it's being reappropriated by the authorities as 'street art', 'urban renewal' and ideological propaganda.
>>8006774
No, street art is the result of a bunch of ghetto criminals who don't respect private property as you can imagine from a bunch of thieves.
Graffiti was always the doings of rebels and criminals who didn't respect their surroundings.
And I fucking hate the word "capital".
You can spot the rococo marxist from a mile then.
>>8006796
(you) really shouldn't be posting bait like this
>>8006796
>I'm so obsessed with and terrified of da niggers that I'm willing to get cucked to death by the state and capital as long as they provide illusory sense of safety
>>8006813
I respect smart commies. It's always the fucking pseudo's who romanticize criminal behaviour as if it is some burgeoning anti-capitalist revolt.
Same with the riots in London a few years ago. They couldn't shut up about how this was an anti-capitalist struggle.
Even Zizek said he didn't perceive it as such a revolt against "capital", but as a mere rabble of consumerist thieves.
>>8006816
>ur a slave
Your alternative is a fairy land in the far ( or near, since you're always claiming any street fight is a sign we're almost there, same with the Arab Spring, you were also going on about how world revolution was near ) future where all works out fine.
Sorry, but some of us grow the fuck up and try and be pragmatic and don't use entire societies and millions of people as a laboratory for the creation of paradise, dumbass.
>>8006772
The racist on the right says that black people are different by saying they're bad, usually using criminal statistics.
The racist on the left says that black people are different by elevating them or treating them like children, usually by saying something a black person does isn't their fault.
The end result is the same - black people are inherently different and that must be fixed. The right says they're more criminal and the left says they need to be coddled like babies.
graffiti is really edgy and no i dont find it to be like cave painting at all, more often than not it's just tagging your name or identity instead of leaving something more meaningful and provoking. it is really almost always JUST vandalism and nothing more, and even when it is more than just a tag it is still edgy vandalism.
>>8006831
>don't use entire societies and millions of people as a laboratory for the creation of paradise, dumbass.
beats using entire societies and millions of people as a laboratory whose only purpose is to generate profits
>>8006897
Ehhh, every time you guys experimented with bringing about utopia literally millions died and your silly theory can never ever be sold back to the people who inhabited it.
When a capitalist is set loose, the whole of society prospers sooner or later, in ALL cases. The fact people end up in poverty or there's some deaths is nowhere near the total wastelands marxism leaves behind.
You can tell this thread is fucking garbage from the beginning when graffiti is immediately associated with black people.
>>8006918
Why? Because it's 'racist'?
Obviously the OP refers to modern day street art ( look at the pic ). It all began in the Bronx and Philly, who happen to be predominantly black, dork.
I remember visiting the Met when I was young, and there was a very, very old organ installed there. You were able to see behind it, and there was graffiti there which, if I remember correctly, was at least 600 years old.
I don't have anything else to contribute, just saying you should check it out if you have the opportunity.
>>8006883
I've never seen a leftist criticize a white person for doing committing they would forgive a black person for.
And no, box braids and other examples of appropriation don't count, because leftists don't see the practice of black culture as inherently a bad thing.
>>8006971
>I've never seen a leftist criticize a white person for doing committing they would forgive a black person for.
Have you not been watching the news? Whenever a black person is shot by the police, the liberal narrative is that of police brutality. They always say that when a black person commits a crime, it's society's fault for failing the black person. In essence, they're saying that a black person is too immature to be responsible for his own actions.
>>8006925
the first tagger to go all-city ("viral") and thus the patient-zero of all modern graf was TAKI 183. He was of Greek extraction in mostly Latino Washington Heights.
Zephyr, Duster, Seen, Cap, Min and other kings of the subway era were straight-up white. Graf did not "start" in the Bronx, graf pre-dates hip-hop.
>>8006925
Even if that is so, modern graffiti extends far beyond the black community. Many races have participated to elevate the practice into what it is now.
To relate it solely to black people is racist, dork.
>>8006660
this guy is asspained af
>>8006883
>>8006982
This anon is right: it's paternalism.
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
Leftists are mortally afraid of being labelled as racist or "insensitive" by other leftists who are endlessly virtue signalling with the rest of the pack so they won't even think of venturing a single criticism of black behavior in public when it is honestly called for. They will deflect and defend said behavior without seeing how inherently patronizing and harmful this is in the long term.
The effect of this kind of bigotry stunts the black community just as badly as right-wing racism does; it just takes longer to really see it.
>>8007000
No one even said that graffiti artists of today are only blacks.
Why do you leftists always give these silly fucking nuances with "n-n-not all.." in every discussion. From muslims to graffiti.
We are not denying that. It doesn't change the fact that it's mostly done by blacks.
The original loci of what we understand modern street art to be are predominantly black areas. They started it.
And conservative mind perceives it as vandalism ( which it is ). A progressive mind considers it a noble skirmish against "le capital".
Are leftists really unable to get math? To get the idea of averages?
>>8007000
>Even if that is so
if that is so then it is fine to immediately associate it with black people because they are the progenitors of it. this is like making a faggy dork post in a jazz thread on /mu/ complaining about jazz being immediately associated with black people. "but white people play it too". yes but they very obviously didn't start it you idiot.
stop screaming racist you fucking absolute dork cunt.
>>8007026
Funny how that never counts for whites though.
When whites commit atrocities they're always considered to be these well-aware bloodthirsty scheming incarnates of evil. Conscious of what they do at every turn.
Blacks and muslims ( their new fav pet, moreso than blacks I'd say ) are these passive recipients of whatever is the result of contextual factors.
>>8007035
>It doesn't change the fact that it's mostly done by blacks
>The original loci of what we understand modern street art to be are predominantly black areas. They started it.
no. read it again.
>>8006997
outside of philly and parts of NY and LA, graf has been mostly white since most of america is white. It was mostly skateboard culture that spread it. that's mostly white dudes. you don't know what you're talking about.
>>8007053
>suddenly graffiti becomes a white thing
I'm done.
>>8007064
you're saying it's black based off your feelings and conjecture. I post facts and you ignore it
>>8007053
>denying black accomplishments because others do it too
Next thing you're gonna tell me they weren't kangz.
>>8007047
>When whites commit atrocities they're always considered to be these well-aware bloodthirsty scheming incarnates of evil. Conscious of what they do at every turn.
who says that. Ive never experienced that in my life
>>8007075
as I said before, graf pre-dates hip hop in NYC. it was all boroughs and neighborhoods all doing it, not just the black ones. this is all well documented.
>49 posts
>barely any hiphop
>0 SAMO
I'm not giving y'all niggas books, have a movie.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZW87QICWaE
>>8007053
>you don't know what you're talking about.
THE PROGENITORS OF THE ENTIRE FUCKING THING WERE BLACK
IT IS FIRST AND FOREMOST BLACK CULTURE
STOP POSTING ANY TIME
>>8007081
Look at identity politics today.
Blacks, muslims and the whole lot are excused for their behaviour because 'context', 'history' and all the other nurture crap.
Whites today, on the other hand, are, even though history moves in impersonal ways, culpable for pretty much their entire history, the goings on of today, and so forth.
BUT they possess the free will to check their privilege and undo that sin.
We are able to turn the tide, but the PoC lot can't because we haven't changed our ways yet.
>>8007096
I tried to tell you Taki 183 was Greek, but you ignored me. here's his picture.
here's the 1971 NYT article that explained the whole thing and showed the city that you can get famous for this, causing graffiti as we know it to happen.
http://taki183.net/_pdf/taki_183_nytimes.pdf
YOU don't know what you're talking about.
>>8007035
Never said I was a leftist. And it's pretty telling that you think this a "leftist vs righty" issue.
>>8007096
Rock was created by black people, do they get associated with the entire scope of the genre? No, because that's fucking stupid. And don't use caps. You'll look like a child.
>>8007095
It's not like anybody in this thread actually has any knowledge of the topic, you know.
>>8007095
I love graffiti, but I fucking hate Basquiat.
It's boring and repetitive.
I think tags look more interesting than this crap.
>>8007139
SAMO isn't just Basquiat.
Though if you don't like Lichtenstein, Warhol, et al, not liking Basquiat is perfectly understandable, but the criticism of "boring and repetitive" to an artists' group which satirised mass produced culture and named itself after the phrase "same old, same old" kind of misses the aim of the work, to the point I suspect u trollin.
