I like the art of graffiti. I dislike useless graffiti.
There is no art in tagging or woofshit, throw-up pieces painters on public and private property. It is worse when these shitty "artists" repwtitevy paint their name like three year olds on people's fences, or on beautiful old buildings.
I sound like a grumpy, old man.
Which I am.
But that doesn't change the fact that there is little creativity in much of what is considered graffiti. The only social commentary it adds, is that those who do it are socially stunted attention-seekers without the balls or capacity to actually do anything of value that would put them in the spotlight as themselves.
The entry picture of this piece looked very much like that grey box below which sits next to it, but it looks like in the last couple days someone decided to do something different with it. Not great, but at least it is colourful and happy, rather than depressing like the box.
What is the point of this trash?
Beauty might be in the eye of the beholder, but if this is what people believe is beautiful whether visually or ideologically, there is something very wrong with them. And this isn't new of course, it has been happening for decades, but doesn't that tell something also?
About ten years ago I was taking photos in an abandoned building and a guy was in there painting. I talked to him and he let me take some photos that didn't show his face - but he was at least mid-thirties at the time and is probably still doing much the same today. But there are a couple generations between him and the kids who are doing it, which is depressing in its own right.
Not everything has to be beautiful, but it seems that so much of what we do today is not just ugly, it is also useless. There is no function to it other than feeding our own warped egos. Even social media which is filled with things that are meant to be beautiful, are actually dystopic, with pouting lips injected with synthetic chemicals and then edited with digital enhancements to create something that is meant to represent a human, but is the antithesis.
We live in a disreality.
Perhaps it is that we have shifted away from doing anything of meaning, to doing anything that makes us feel relevant in the moment.
"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" | Andy Warhol
He was somewhat correct, but perhaps Warhol thought that everyone would do something relevant, something meaningful. But the thing is that people are made to feel relevant without doing anything at all, and have at times zero publicity. Social media is just this, where people comment on random topics and feel like they have done something, that they have been seen, but they are just another comment in the mass of comments making zero real impression on anyone. They feel like they have a global audience, but no one is looking.
But it isn't for 15 minutes, it is daily.
In the past I think that fame generally had to come through achievement and often excelling at something. Or being a monster. Now though, fame isn't accomplished by doing something of note, it is by curating content that is meaningless to attract people who are willing to consume meaningless content. It is a race to the bottom for humanity, where rather than innovating to add value and build skill, it is innovation to most efficiently dilute it.
When beauty is all only skin deep.
A beautiful face to look at, doesn't make the owner a beautiful person. Looks fade, bodies sag, and a beautiful person can still be as beautiful and even more so. But when everything is skin deep, when there is no personality, no craft, no kindness, no process, no skill, no use - then what does it all become? What is the true value of something that is beautiful, but does nothing? When there is no story under the surface, no life journey, no meaning?
No soul.
Society is fast becoming a landscape of the soulless.
For the soulless.
Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]
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