Brandon Thomas Baunach has created a Graffiti Report Card, inspired by Graffiti Critique, that allows you to give feedback on graffiti. Just print out the PDF, fill it out when you come across some street art that could use some critiquing.
It’s a project I started a couple of months ago after seeing my neighborhood (The Mission District of San Francisco) receive an amazing amount of ugly, large, and talentless graffiti. I wanted a way to combat the ugly graffiti while at the same time give praise to the talented graffiti writers who I feel make the streets more beautiful. It occurred to me, that many of our local taggers don’t realize how ugly and talentless their graffiti is, so I wanted to give them some feedback.
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I wrote a post about bad grafiti at my blog the other day. It was inspired by Herbert Baglione. Check out his wall art. It’s amazing.
Whatever happened to just writing ‘TOY’ on toy graf?
LOL. A little *too* arch don’t you think? But I love it. I’ll give it to the inker next door.
This is a terrible and idiotic idea. Besides the fact that such criticism is nothing more than an ‘airing of prejudices’ (W.S. Burroughs) It ignores the fact that part of the value of grafitti is that it often functions as an array of images overlaid on the city walls. To judge graffiti peices as individual works is ignorant of its place in an overal hypergraphic system which works in conjunction with the city itself. To make stupid report cards seems to me to be more of a statement to reflect upon the jerk who issues such dumb critiques, it says ‘hey, I’m hip enough to accept graffiti, and I’m intellectual enough to determine what’s good art and what isn’t and if those two traits combine to make me a pretentious dickweed then what the heck, huh?”
This moronic project also clearly makes the assumption that all graffiti aspires to be great art when much of the graffiti out there is good because it doesn’t make such pretentions – and in my own opinion the crude and blunt graffiti that’s out there is the most interesting, while the graffiti produced by technically talented artists concerned with making the ‘city more beautiful’ is often boring and contrived. Brandon Thomas Baunach has stupid ideas.
To Zonal: “Brandon Thomas Baunach has stupid ideas.” is like a template for bad graffiti itself. Bust out those markers, boy!
Where I grew up… you put one of these report cards or call someone a toy… chances are they would walk up to you and shoot you in the face.
So the graffiti artist is by definition “authentic” and beyond criticism (and the less skill the better, apparently). But Thomas, who actually takes graffiti seriously, and who is himself adding to the “hypergraphic” system of the city (of which he is a part, too, you know) is somehow a “moron” for adding his own comments?
What incredibly pompous pomo jackassery.
So Zonal likes the talentless scrawl? Well, Thomas doesn’t. Who the hell is Zonal to tell him to shut up? Oh, that’s right, he’s a patronizing pseudoanthropologist trying to protect the “primitive” work of the “natives” from criticism from the class of people he doesn’t like….those who don’t draw on other peoples’ property.
I’m printing up some report cards now.
Excellent. I’ve had an idea like this for awhile now, to start tagging pieces with grades and comments like at the top of grade-school papers: “A-: Great 3D” or “D: Try sampling someone besides Vaughan Bode”
I think anyone can determine if a piece of graffiti is a well done piece of art or an unstylized scrawl done by drunk teenagers (which litter my neighborhood). Something like this which can encourage those with talent and let the toys know they need to either improve or give it up is a great idea.
who the fuck are you to judge? what a pretentious project.
Yeah, and where I grew up, you’d get shot in the face for fucking up someone else’s wall in the first place.
I cannot believe we are supposed to react to graffiti with anything other than utter and total contempt.
“who the fuck are you to judge”
The graffiti artist judged the surface to be ugly or at least useless…why can’t other community members have their say on what replaced it? Is the tag sacred? Why is someone with a spraycan better than the rest of us?
Jim, who the pharke are you to believe that you can bland down society with illogical and misplaced scrawlings?
Am I, along with hundreds of thousands of other non-subcultured people, supposed to be impressed or care or support your important scribblings across cities around the world?
Oooooo KZ57 hates DarioX…wow, this must be put across a train carriage.
Oh no! Mazuz has a thing for 44AAAA, wow, please no, ruin some activist graffiti or a mural, but painting it on top. Make sure that those you hate also ruin the mural.
Yeah, your cause is more important than spending that same amount of time helping end global warming.
Thanks Jim
btw this is not a judgement. Its a neutral culture jam to allow people to critique in the open, rather than their minds.
Your support for tagging is not superior than this sticker, and vice versa.
It should be noted that ( in New York City at least), any dumass who puts his illegible, crappy tags on top of somebody else’s piece gets a beatdown if they get caught–how’s that for a report card?
Perhaps ZF should go to Brooklyn and educate the taggers there in the error of their ways, chastising their lack of respect for the ‘overall hypergraphic system’–I ‘m sure he’d receive a proper street response to his academic b.s.
To anyone who asked who I am to judge Thomas B’s idea, I think that given the context of this discussion that is a rediculous question – furthermore it suggests that unless someone is going to respond to an idea with anything but platitudes they require credentials – I’m confident that my arguments are sound and I continue to stand by them – the graffiti report card idea is dumb. For one thing I doubt that any graffiti guy would take them seriously, for another it pretends that all graffiti practitioners want is to be acknowledged as great artists – another problem is that it assumes that there is a canon of graffiti that all work should aspire to be like, and the people who know it best are who? boing boing readers?! – this project ignores how graffiti functions culturally and tries to force it into the model of high art – which is stupid and if anyone thinks that graffiti writers are going to conform to the expectations of some goofball hipsters, they’re wrong. To Fred Barks, the graffiti artist is not beyond criticism but the kind of criticism being proposed by this stupid report card idea is rooted in ignorance, and this is true regardless of whether or not Thomas himself takes graffiti seriously – this is a useless effort to make something he clearly doesn’t understand very well to conform to a personal set of standards – incidentally you’re use of the terms ‘primitive’ and ‘native’ although obviously used derisively, was actually very apt because historically ‘primitive’ art has been judged by the standards of people of more ‘civilized’ cultures, and by such standards ‘primitive’ art has been deemed inferior when it is in fact not understood. It’s also apt in another way, in the sense that many ‘primitive’ cultures do not consider their cultural objects to be art at all, which may be the case with much graffiti.
Dear DW, why is it that people to talk a lot of tough talk (you, for example) often seem to issue vague threats in conjunction with rediculous suggestions? So you’re saying I’ll get an ultra-hardcore beatdown from some real muscular NYC street toughs if…IF I go to Brooklyn and try to discuss cultural theory with them? Well I’m not going to do that, so I’m safe. These kinds of exchanges seem to occur online so I suspect its rooted in a fantastic desire to defer arguments from the text of the internet to the real world where that intellectual bullshit isn’t tolerated! Say a word like ‘hypergraphic’ on my street and you get knocked the fuck out! Maybe I should get away from all this academic BS and move to Brooklyn where people communicate in gorilla sounds? ho ho!
Internet. Serious business.
@ZF – you’ll just have to create report cards for the report cards.
wow, talk about passive aggressive hipster bullshit. if you don’t like a particular piece of graffiti, you should just paint over it. but you know, its all rather derivative and uninspiring and should be buried in a fucking time capsule labeled 1982 because that’s the year it died.
as an urban/street artist, i take offense when some pretentious wannabes that just found a sharpie tag up and down a street on every object in their path. i’m referring to the type of tagger with zero experience and has obviously not done this before. now, we have all seen it and heard someone say ‘my friend john, just started tagging and it looks like shit. he’s the ahole that tagged on that wall every 10 ft.’ i just request that they perfect their art (just like i perfect mine before i paste and try to mind other people’s work and shops/homes) at home on a board or paper before taking it to the streets. how many of you discussing the value of graffiti are actually graff writers or street artists? are u guys just bitching bc u can? bc all the best graff writers i know would be out tagging or sleeping rather than get all philosophical about what they do.
As a casual observer and the husband of a woman who really likes the backdrop of graffiti, I will have to chime in on the tagging thing. Three years ago I confronted some turkey in the alleyway Cedar writing his name with a black magic marker on everything and at two foot intervals. I told him that he should take the time to do sometihng creative and good to look at – not just put his name everywhere. And his tag looked like that bubbly shit I did when I was in sixth grade living in York, PA. The guy waited for me to turn around and then spray painted my back while I was on my motorcycle.
I drove up the street on Post along the sidewalk chasing him. When I caught him he swung his paint bag at me like a girl. After knocking his ass out, I was smashing his face in with his own paint cans when the cops pulled up.
Moral: You should paint some decent shit that takes a bit of planning and forethought or get the junk kicked out of you.
your graffiti report card is toy
GRAFF LIVES!!!
judging by the comments, graffiti is way more serious than i ever imagined
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