Here’s a (much missed) piece of graffiti - little more than tagging - which has it’s own Wikipedia page. Does that make it art? (Joking)
GIVE PEAS A CHANCE
j
Artistic merit, I guess, and that is a combination of talent and effort. It takes neither for a dog to spray its message on a wall and most tags have about that level of effort and thought put into them. If someone has gone to a lot of trouble to make their tag look good, does shading and 3D effects or even has the cojones to climb up somewhere difficult and scary to do their tagging I’ll give ‘em some props but some fucktard just mindlessly scrawling his rudimentary tag up and down a street on people’s cars and windows and shit? Nah, fuck that. I don’t care if “Piss Christ” IS in a goddamned museum, that’s a garbage bit of art and I have no respect for it. Banksy, now, leaves whimsical, complicated, interesting and esthetically pleasing bits of art in strange places and the places he chooses are usually a part of the art itself so he gets all props. So do the people who make “fairy doors” and leave them about to be found, they’re technically vandalism as well but what kind of an assmunch would go hatin’ on those? And in Portland we have all these iron rings left in the sidewalk edges, meant to tie horses to from back in the day and people go around leaving interesting little Breyer and other model horses “tied” to them and it just makes my day whenever I see one. Art is pleasing, art gives you a lift or makes you think or smile. Like the guy says “I know it when I see it.” 
It may not be politic to say it but much prehistoric art is interesting only because it’s prehistoric. It’s venerated as if it’s amazing in other ways but it often isn’t.
I call it street art. And I like it.
But heck, I even liked the tagged boxcars. It’s kinda romantic to send your name across the country to places you may never get to visit. I don’t really appreciate most tagging and graffiti. But well-done, thoughtful art that suits the surrounding or brightens up the surroundings are welcome in my view.
I love some of them. They are very nice to look at. Better than a plain rusty boxcar.
I loooooove a well tagged boxcar, if I’m gonna be sitting at a RR crossing waiting for ten kazillion cars to trundle by I appreciate the little mental vacation wondering where they’ve been and who put the art on there and then who added to that art and where’s it going next…and then the train’s gone and I feel a bit refreshed and go about my day.
Eh, it’s really hard to put a finger on the reason for its appeal- that photo just doesn’t do it justice somehow- but it really did have an odd attraction. It used to be the best thing about the M25. You could definitely make a case for it being art.
As I’m currently back in Bristol, which advertises its graffiti as a tourist attraction, with good reason, I can definitely appreciate a good bit of street art. I’ve even seen complaints in the local paper about people ‘graffiti-ing over the artwork’ when none of the painting was in any way authorised.
Yes, at least buy him dinner first.
You reminded me of the Berlin Wall. This story is three or four years old, so I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but when we were there I was greatly cheered by what had happened to the largest remaining section of the wall, out near the railway station. Paintings had been officially commissioned to cover parts of the remaining wall, generally celebrating (from memory) the end of communism and the reunification of the city; over parts of these, and in the spaces between, other (uncommissioned) artists had made their own paintings; and on top of these, other people had added tags and simple stuff like Jurgen was here 2015 or whatever. It was genuinely uplifting to see, on what had once been a symbol of oppression, layer upon layer of freedom. I found Berlin a hard city to like, but this cheered me immensely.
Re: PEAS - there was another similar thing visible from the London-bound M40, maybe earlier than it’s more famous sibling, which read (again from memory): WHY DO I HAVE TO DO THIS EVERY DAY? NO MORE WAR. GIVE PEAS A CHANCE.
j
Of course that’s true. It’s not as if we’re seeing the product of the Michelangelo of 25,000 BCE; the artist might have been the worst even in his or her own village. But given that we don’t have thousands of examples to compare it to, it’s still massively interesting, whatever the artistic merits.
It’s one of the things I absolutely loved about Bristol. I miss visiting.