And I'd rather see graffiti, even if I find some ugly, than ads all over. And there's way more public ads anywhere than graffiti. I think local urban expressions like stickers and graffiti is pretty cool. The mainstream prefers ads I guess.
For one thing, it can be costly to remove graffiti. And when it's on publicly owned property, who pays for that removal? The public, of course.
If, for example, a train is the target of graffiti, it will often need to be taken out of service. This, then, results in a degraded service to the travelling public.
Furthermore, graffiti artists often put themselves in dangerous situations. Numerous people have been seriously injured or killed when doing graffiti. That not only sucks for them, but also has various knock-on effects.
Some graffiti art can look really nice, whereas others have little artistic value. Regardless, the negative impacts of graffiti should not be overlooked.
The cost incurred here is a choice the owner makes when they disagree with the aesthetics of the graffiti.
And your framing is odd - can you only dislike one of these things? Graffiti or ads? There are successful movements to rid cities and scenic areas of ads, or to tone them down.
The reason is that whoever puts an ad does so on their own property. You don't put an ad on someone else's wall against their will.
Graffiti, on the other hand, is usually done without authorization from the owner of the wall or facade being graffitied.
But you're right, certainly not as bad as a bank robbery.
How about neither?
EDIT, for the mods, artificial or not: Japanese spoliation aesthetics are a safe-ish counterexample for rightwingers as they localize the field of contention to the high local effort-high social payoff quadrant, where existing metrics are not questioned. You really want to constrain debate to the low local effort-high global payoff quadrant, which triggers all stripes, but are most relevant for humanity. Consider a GPT7 that requires only 10 dollars to train. Its worthwhile to think about but scares the bejeezus out of most folks.
Analogously, left wingers want to move the debate to low local effort-low global cost quadrant, because it seems straightforward to redefine cost metrics… moat and bailey dynamics really, quite curious.
Its Art.
I would like to understand why people take offense in it - especially if done on places that are so non-important.
It's a reason it is a crime, although sadly it doesn't seem to be really enforced or punished, given the prevalence.
There is whole subculture, competition and collaboration networks between fan groups.
Some call it bestial street fighting where people lose lives and health but some might find it fascinating…
I get your point though, on reading the comment I replied to, after reading yours, it's clear to me that the equivalence implication is fairly weak. Your interpretation seems more accurate.
They can involve multiple lives being at much greater risk and a large amount of resources allocated to criminals. The fact that it doesn't come from the bank but an insurance agency doesn't change anything. The money comes from somewhere.
The context was the graffiti subculture around the German rail system, although I didn't specify, that's what I was referring to. Of course graffiti on private residences is practically just vandalism. There aren't subcultures around that though, besides subcultures that just revolve around general vandalism.
In that vein, you should probably get graffiti insurance if that's a concern.
I am for tough penalties on the authors of grafitis. At least make them pay the full cost of cleaning them up plus heavy fines.
I somewhat agree with you if we are talking about low effort tagging, especially on homes.
However if I had to choose between some ambitious criminals being given a large amount of money or if some wall getting a bad piece of art on it, I would always choose the latter.
