Toivo's "hope." for Toronto

http://flickr.com/photos/delineated/210640379/

I recently used this in my Pretty/Ugly exhibit. Thanks, Toivo for the inspiration. :)

We at Torontoist's comment section hope that Torontonians will find ways to write on their own property and not deface public and private property with graffiti in 2007.

I hope she chooses a better way to spread a positive message.

Did he do the big "hope" at the brickworks?

I'll stop documenting urban art when:

1. Everyone has an equal voice.
2. As a culture, we stop eating our young and then blaming them for how they turn out.

When those two things happen, there probably won't be much need for graffiti. I especially like "hope." and "I Love You" because positive messages are under-represented in our culture. If you don't believe me, check out "Systemic Flaws In the Reported World View":

http://edge.org/q2007/q07_1.html#andersont

Some responses to your questions:

Toivo was inspired by the "I Love You" graffiti, but not the same artist.

Puns are inherently bad -- they're puns. But I fully support the notion that we should not etch anything into each other with acid.

Not sure about the brickworks -- anyone?

Thanks for your comments, everyone!

As soon as Toivo lets us all know where she lives so we can all go spraypaint whatever we want on her property she'll cease to be an obnoxious tagger asshole.

Regardless of your feelings on tagging, I think the one asshole at the very least would be the one jumping around calling people "obnoxious assholes" and threatening malicious attack.

if TOIVO wants to tag my house with "hope" she is more than welcome to....seriously.

such visciousness over soemthign so positive. those who are complaining, please post your comments on advertising littering up our visual space. i pay taxes and i don't want to see advertising in our public spaces ...

"i love you" & "hope" rock.

haters begone. to paraphrase kerouac: i have no use for your hate; you may take it back and keep it.

100% with D Rywall on this one. Tagging "hope" around the place isn't art and it isn't clever, nor is it justified simply because the person's in a sulk, or it's a "positive" message. It's the kind of thing I'd expect to find on my wall, if I left a toddler alone with a box of crayons.

What I would find positive is being able to enjoy a piece of public property somewhere around the city - like the tree/flower bedding - without seeing someone's moronic scribblings around the base.

hope

Wait a minute - can someone explain why I can't spray paint her front door?

Because it's not my door?

Ohhhh the hypocrisy of it all.

Let me simplify my position for you: can I walk up to any door of any house out of the blue and spray paint "hooray for squirrels!" on it just because I feel like it?

Probably not, eh?

That her message is the cutesy tutesy happy puppies and sunshine "hope" is entirely irrelevant.

Not her property, not hers to deface. End of story. But not the end of taggers and pro-taggers' hypocrisy.

Ohhhh man this is so ridiculous.

So her self-proclaimed right to artistic expression trumps all?
How obnoxiously selfish and arrogant.

My right to clean grafitti-free public buildings and spaces without stupid slogans or names or Val Kilmers on them trumps her destructive behaviour every single time.

anon - you're an ass.

I get really tired of seeing tags all over everything. The few graffitti artists I've met have been white and male and seem to have the teeth that a middleclass upbringing would provide for. Don't tell me that you don't have the resources to purchase a canvas to create your art. You aren't some poor black or puerto rican kid in the Bronx or Philedelphia in the 70's. And even if you are totally broke, stop tagging private property with just yer name, jerkface. Like upski said, if you were an MC all you'd be saying is your name, over and over and over again. What kind of rap would that be? How is what you're doing hip hop, or even art?

That said, I can't seem to get to work without seeing those stupid Bell beavers at least once. Those guys get up more than any tagger or graf artists I've ever seen. Even Trik don't get around like Bell. Sure, they paid for it, but it's kinda nauseating to see it as often as I do.

Anticorum: Though we encourage open communication, Torontoist reserves the right to -- and does -- delete offensive and abusive comments, especially when they are posted anonymously.

Giving someone's home address and encouraging them to show up and trash the place absolutely falls under that policy.

My right to clean grafitti-free public buildings and spaces without stupid slogans or names or Val Kilmers on them trumps her destructive behaviour every single time.

Where in the Charter is that particular right enshrined? I'm pretty sure our "freedom of expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication" is there.

Sorry rek, let me simplify it for you as well:

Common human decency and respect with regards to things owned by everybody trumps the immature, selfish and vandalous acts of individuals every single time.

Your approval of tagging is based on the content, which is hypocritical bullshit. Had she been painting swastikas around town, she'd be hunted down and charged. That she chooses to spread oogy googy Hallmark card sentiments is entirely irrelevant.

So our private property is sacred and not to be touched while public property is fair game for the simple reason that we all "own it" and therefore we each have the right to do to it whatever we please?

That is utterly ridiculous.

The increasingly pervasive advertising around the city is 100% more offensive to me than any grafitti. Do we really need to wrap entire subway stations in ads?

I would love it if the city would offer to sell what's typically used as ad space to regular old citizens for a reduced price. Even if it wasn't affordable to one person, a group could get together and buy one. Then you could stick whatever you wanted in there, as long as it wasn't an ad. More art, less ads and the city still makes some money.

I can dream, can't I?

Sharon - To quote myself:

Ultimately what I would like to see is the city designate virtually every alley wall a protected public art surface. I'd like to see every TTC station street-level platform turned into a community bulletin board. I'd like every street corner to have its own concrete pillar for people to tape up whatever it is they have to say. I'd like special walls constructed in the downtown and in parks for graf writers to paint.

I'll add to that by saying we need restrictions on where advertising can be placed, and an additional hefty size-proportional per-instance tax that goes right to the city's coffers for ad surfaces larger than sandwich boards.

Rek - you dream of protected public art spaces?

How exactly is that? You don't give a shit about what happens to any other public spaces.

On the one hand you expect people to respect those spaces and leave the art there untouched while on the other you demand that taggers have the right to impose their art/tagging/bullshit on any public surface they choose.

Hilarious.

Rywall - Yes, I do, and for two reasons:

1) Public art walls would take the decision of whether something should be buffed/covered out of the hands of city staff and put it in the hands of everyone who is free to use the walls. As it stands, that mom & pop on the corner is going to get fined for not cleaning up their walls, even if they told the artist to paint it.

2) Art walls would give artists surfaces they could take their time on, walls they wouldn't have to scrawl quick and dirty out of fear of harrassment and arrest, and they wouldn't have to paint where and when the opportunity presents itself. The vast majority of graffiti in this city isn't splattered across churches and quaint little homes or defacing memorials to our dead, it's tucked under bridges and down alleys and poking out here and there from construction hoarding and long-neglected properties.

Anticorum - I would rather every billboard in the city was covered in ABORTION KILLS BABIES 666 and crude marker drawings of dicks than all the ads we're already "captive audience" to. At least then it would be actual humans expressing themselves. Is there any non-commercial not-approved-by-the-BIA street art you do like?

Incidentally, for what it's worth - Sharon Harris is not only deleting comments from this thread and banning the users who posted them, she's also pre-moderating comments - so the only comments you'll see now are those that have passed moderation.

Compare with, say, her policy of scrawling graffiti on privately owned buildings, against the owner's wishes.

Uh, wow. I think that as the comments have escalated, people have lost sight of the original post. Nowhere does Sharon tell everyone to go "cover both public and private property with graffiti". She doesn't even mention private property in the post. All of the accompanying pictures are of public property. What she does say, is this:

We at Torontoist hope that Torontonians will find new ways to tag each other with inspiring messages in 2007.

Tagging sometimes implies graffiti, but I don't think that's what she necessarily meant (correct me if I'm wrong, Sharon). Tagging can also imply touching, as with the game of tag. I think what she meant is that she hopes that we find ways to inspire and connect with each other in general.

Now, "Toronto", go back and read the original post. Do you really care that much that someone has posted pictures of the word "hope." that you want people to antagonize her at her home?

Oh Christ almighty Anon, you've passed the line from being prickishly disingenuous to actively lying.

Sharon Harris is not deleting any comments here. Any deletion that is taking place is happening at the hand of Torontoist's editorial staff. Marc already laid out exactly why your comment got deleted.

That said, Sharon's last post wins a few prizes too. I'm in favour of people who make the city beautiful, which would make me "for urban art". And I'm agin people who make the city ugly, which would make me "against graffiti". And yet you will search here in vain for my exciting new solutions or my aggressive threats of violence. I think your characterization of one side is short-sighted and naive and the other is short-sighted and mean.

And, just in case the anonymous troll's spirit infects you and makes you pull out one out-of-context sentence to base your entire reply on, could it at least be this one where I ask again what you think of the people who tag up murals?

Oh for chrissake.

I'm the one who wrote
"As soon as Toivo lets us all know where she lives so we can all go spraypaint whatever we want on her property she'll cease to be an obnoxious tagger asshole."

And suddenly that's the position of everybody on the thread who opposes tagging? That's bullshit. (And "suggesting violence"? Rightttt. Spare me the hysterics.)

And rek - suddenly you're all about rules and regs with your public art space idea. So people should follow those rules and respect the wishes of people who (in your twisted public "we all own it" sense) "own" those public art spaces. Everybody is supposed to leave that art up for all to see and not mess with it, while a planter or a TTC wall is fair game for anyone to paint anything on anytime.

Again, you pro-taggers are all hypocrites. You only approve of tagging whose content pleases you.

Anticorum - I didn't intend to stretch anything. Unless I missed it, the only street art I saw you acknowledge even vaguely postively before Absolut's campaign was (re?)introduced to the conversation was community murals obliterated by taggers.

I'm not about to debate you on the subject or subjectivity of what "adds" versus what "subtracts" from the city. But it is interesting that you put street art in the "adds" and graffiti in the "subtracts" columns. I'm not sure what's going on there.

To be clear, I never stated or meant to imply I found ABORTION KILLS BABIES or drawings of dicks to be uplifting and valuable works of art, just valid forms of personal expression (even if I disagree with the message!). As I mentioned in the Absolut discussion, corporations don't buy ad space because their employees want everyone to know how much they like some new product. Corporations aren't people. There is no Mister Nike telling me to Just Do It.

The Vodka chalkings were really nice looking, I never said they weren't. I opposed them because they intentionally circumvented the city's advertising regulations, denied the city its cut, and then left the clean-up to the city. It wasn't ugly because a corporation was behind it, it was intolerable because a corporation was behind it.

D Rywall - The majority of the surfaces already covered with graffiti would be considered public art walls anyway. I'm not some utopian who believes that if only there was an art wall built at such and such a place, nobody would paint or paste anywhere else. We already have rules and regulations against it and it's not stopping writers from 'getting up', I'd just give them surfaces to work on legally, reducing the need to paint just anywhere they can get away with it.

I also said, point one, that anyone would be able to decide was stays and what goes. Art by respected names tends to last longer, and crap gets covered. There isn't much sense of permanence in street art, so why would I think it could be introduced with legal walls? You could walk up to the wall at any time and whitewash it yourself if you wanted.

Now, D Rywall, and that is a clever screen name, this is the last time I'm going to correct you as I have no compelling desire to teach you reading comprehension. I have twice stated, and clarified again in this post, that the content of the tag isn't the issue for me. I value freedom of expression more than I value saying and writing stuff that makes some guys on a blog happy when they see it.

I think the 'hope' tagging, like most tagging, is an incredibly self-indulgent imposition of the tagger's ego on public space. It qualifies as "street art" as much as some yuppie shouting into his cellphone with no regard for those around him qualifies as "street poetry". In my opinion, there's far more artistic integrity in the simple design of, say, a planter, than there is in some hamfisted spraypainting. I've long felt the same way about the "beautification" assholes (revered by spacing magazine) who go around dumping bucketfuls of blue paint on planters, bike posts, etc. downtown.

It's such a fine, subjective, undefinable line between what is stupid and what improves the appearance of public space. A big part of the problem are the copycats and wannabes that make up most of the chaff, as well as the commercialization of street-level marketing.

My previous employer hired street teams to sticker the city (an annoying trend), and that day, I came home to find stupid, randomly-placed stickers fused to the nice granite of my condo building. There's a certain "thorn tree" history when it comes to posting notices on construction hoarding and hydro poles (private property, but generally accepted) vs. the destruction of parking meters and Eucan bins with pasted posters and flyers. I actually have a post coming-up this week about the accountability of this as far as the City is concerned, so stay-tuned.

@rek:
Anticorum - I didn't intend to stretch anything. Unless I missed it, the only street art I saw you acknowledge even vaguely postively before Absolut's campaign was (re?)introduced to the conversation was community murals obliterated by taggers.

Then you don't bother reading very carefully, rek. I spent a lot of time talking about what I consider a very delicate issue: that if public space belongs to us all, then when people take bits of it and make them proprietary, we should ask whether what they've done adds to the urban aesthetic or not. I felt kind of schmaltzy, to be honest, talking about beauty and all that. While I was editing the post, the phrase "the city takes my breath away" snuck in there, before I realized that if I was going to write Toronto Unlimited slogans, I'd wait until I was on their dime, and then to fit their house style I'd probably have to write it "the city takes, my breath away".

And you glossed it all over to latch onto the comforting assumption that the only art I love is vodka ads.

I could have written pretty much the same post to talk about how I'd rather have a thousand clever murals on the walls of garages than one single BIRDS OF WALES stencil on Queen Street. I'd hold the exact same opinions for the exact same reasons, but I suspect you would have given my words a little bit more consideration if I'd couched them in a more congenial example.

I opposed them because they intentionally circumvented the city's advertising regulations, denied the city its cut, and then left the clean-up to the city. It wasn't ugly because a corporation was behind it, it was intolerable because a corporation was behind it.

That actually strikes me as rather sad. You make public space advocacy sound like a Bizarro-world version of capitalist pigdom -- where's that CEO with my ten percent!? I have a lot more trouble getting worked up about the phrase "intentionally circumvented the city's advertising regulations". And as sure as there are people sitting in on City Council meetings to protest billboard variances, I'm sure that the issue at its core isn't legality, it's the presence of advertising at all.

I'd rather have an attractive "illegal" ad than a brutal and ugly "legal" one. (Of course, I don't even think the words "illegal" and "legal" need to be in that last sentence at all for it to still be true...) And in fact, sometimes the "illegal" injections of art are the most powerful. (And again this is a function of the actual work, not whether or not money changed hands for it.)

@Sharon:
I'd be willing to bet that no one approves of tagging murals like Runt's work at Lee's

I'd take that bet, because I could use a few extra dollars. Obviously all of the different people who tag up murals approve of the practice; if they disapproved, they wouldn't have done it! The vast majority of people who write on walls aren't part of any community of artists. These are not "entry-level artists" who are going to grow into true craftsmen. As Jamie Zawinski put it, these people just want to see their pirate names on a wall.

For all of you who are convinced that the world is perfect and that no one has need for hope anymore:

Wow, all of the zero people who've voiced these sentiments in this thread really got shown whatfor. Where did this bit of hostility come from, Sharon?

I'm honestly confused -- you call me "hostile" and "over-the-top" because I responded to this statement by Dog Bone:

Toronto is not a city without visible hope at any time. Toronto in a post-apocalypse nuclear winter, I could understand the need to write "hope" but as it stands (as somebody here perfectly stated) it's somebody deciding to take their personal therapy public by writing trite comments on public property.

I simply provided a few examples where people might appreciate some hope. I think a message of hope is socially relevant these days, and not confined to one person's therapy.

Anticorium -- it did seem you were setting me up for something by asking that question twice, but as you said yourself, doesn't it seem obvious that the taggers themselves would approve of what they do? Was that a riddle? : ) I stated that I don't hang out with graffiti artists, but I've come across passages like the following many times:

Utopia Volume Two, p.170, "Leaving Their Mark: Street Art in Toronto" by Nadja Sayej:

Elicser is a [Toronto] graffiti artist ... Elicser is well-versed in the glossary of graffiti ... He says ... Tags, for example, are simple entry-level signatures done by rookies..."

I've read similar passages about scenes in NYC, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

We've received a few comments here that say everyone has an equal voice. In the public space, where is the individual citizen's voice? Mostly advertisers get to be heard on the street. On the Internet, a writer for a national newspaper or a corporation buying up advertising has a louder voice than most of us. Sure, anyone can start a blog, but unless its advertising budget contains millions of dollars and/or the blogger has training in marketing -- most readers will never know how to find it.

I'm honestly confused -- you call me "hostile" and "over-the-top" because I responded to this statement by Dog Bone

While Dog Bone is pretty dismissive of your beliefs, I don't think any reasonable person would say s/he's "convinced that the world is perfect and that no one has need for hope anymore". So your link is a textbook example of a strawman argument: a devastating counterpoint to something nobody actually said.

Was that a riddle?

Nope. It was my way of pointing out that the graffiti scene in Toronto is not particularly relevant to what I'm trying to say, because the vast majority of the people who write on walls and sidewalks aren't part of any scene. Is there a NYC-style graffiti code of honour in, say, Regina? Because I've been to Regina, and there's a lot of writing on the walls there. Heck, I found writing on the walls in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, population, and I'm pretty sure that few of the 15,000 residents of a cottage town on the shoes of the Shuswap River are part of an inner-city art scene.

Talking about the code of ethics that graffiti artists in New York exported to Chicago and Philadelphia is cool, but I'd prefer discussions that don't need to fall into awkward silence if we start talking about the walls and sidewalks of Wolfville, Nova Scotia (pop 3500) instead. (There's taggers there too.) My arguments don't depend on a critical mass of self-organizing artists, and maybe yours don't either, but I don't think you've brought that to the table yet.

On the Internet, a writer for a national newspaper or a corporation buying up advertising has a louder voice than most of us.

Their fonts are bigger? They use brighter page backgrounds? Oh, you mean that they get more readers, right? Well, actually, that's wrong. Success is a function of passionate writing, not million-dollar advertising.

As John Rogers put it:

My TV round-up below was linked to by both Warren Ellis, angry ideaspace god of transhumanism and Red Bull, and the Maclean's magazine website. Macleans is essentially the Time magazine of Canada.

Pageviews inbound from Warren are running 3 to 1 over inbound from Macleans.
We live in a world where a guy who writes comic books, but actually hasn't written any commercially-successful comic books for a few years now (and remember that by "commercially-successful" in the comic book industry you mean "sold most of a print run of 5,000 copies") can vastly outperform Canada's national newsmagazine in driving traffic today ... when he's writing about something he cares about. And that long tail will only get longer over time.

If it takes the backing of a Ted Rogers or Jim Shaw to get your message out, how can we be here right now, throwing out citations from the uTOpia series? Where is any municipal issue in the past few years where the Sun or the Star have been in the driver's seat? Hell, the TTC-redesign thread shows that the city's big media have gone from paraphrasing Spacing's press releases to running them verbatim.

I think your dire attitude about our public voice is way too dark, and it's an unjustified darkness. I have faith that we're going to find passion, and like it when we find it. Insert bad pun about "hope" here.

this discussion is not even scraping the surface.

Then you should bring what you'd like to the table (though it may be that the thread's life has finally run out). I'd had no idea about the sculptors' intent for the statue -- I still feel like the graffiti diminished its iconic power, but at least now I know there was at least one curator who agreed with me, wrong as they may have been. :-)

Couple of things.

drywall... you are a troll. Move on to a new location please.

Rek, if you are who I believe you are.. the city should be giving you 10 percent of the corporate billboard space that they have permitted corporations to writers like you for graf

jx

Wow so much bitching...
Such an unimportant topic...

But I like your shit Hope im sure your checking this...Ive taken photos of some of your tags that had good placement. Keep it up.
-Trik