Montreal has enjoyed the benefits of this huge urban art scene which has covered the
walls in murals, employed hundreds of artists and brought millions of tourists to the town
over the years. However there’s a flipside to that coin,
we also have a fairly obvious graffiti problem. Before I get into this video I think I should
point out two things. The first is this is a both a morality thing
and an art thing. So it’s very nuanced and something that I say you’re probably going
to disagree with. Secondly, most graffiti is painted on public
walls. It’s not something that I personally have a lot of experience with that, it’s
not really my form of this stuff. So give me a break here I’m not pretending
to have all the answers, I’m just trying to come at it from a pragmatic centrist sort
of position. So onto the meat.
What do we do about the graffiti that the average Montrealer would call a problem?
The stuff that means the STM is spends millions of dollars a year cleaning instead of buying
a new bus. The stuff a business owner has to call the
city to get removed every two weeks year after year after year.
Well over the years there have been a lot of stupid ideas that’s for sure.
I know where we're wasting money or not there's the whole conversation about banning the sale
of spray paint that constantly comes back every 5 6 years somebody had the bright idea
to promote that and then everyone says that that's the solution not realizing that will
provoke an evolution into another job Because it's not going to stop him and there's
bucket paint there's fire extinguishers there's markers there's a tools etching cream there's
Diamond tip so don't think that just because you ban a type of paint that all of a sudden
people aren’t going to find another way to do it
So tagging is the most obvious graffiti that people want removed.
It’s just the, you know the lines and the name and yeah I think it sucks and looks like
shit. But I’m a bit weird, for most people tagging
is a rite of passage. It's kind of like when you're a kid and you start off with like stick
figures, and your teacher has to label parts so you don’t turn out all fucked up or whatever.
Dog, you learnt the word dog, it is a dog, good for you, please don’t shoot the school
up. You’re just learning how to control your
can and what things look like from a distance and that sort of thing.
And then almost kind of graduates out of that. Until recently there wasn't any art school
for this stuff, so the thing that so many people hate is actually the early stages of
something that so many people love. You're concerned about the tagging and the
bombing and all the illegal stuff that happens then you have to you can't just be like I
like this and I don't like that. You have to understand the whole culture and
in its fullness to understand what the different motivational factors are and also understand
the transition that a lot of the people participating in that culture go through as they mature
as they age or as they travel whatever it is they ship the reason to do things shift
accessibility The Things become more easy with age they they they get you know it's
easier for them to negotiate ask for something not easy for a 15 year old to ask legal permission
for a while and be taken seriously but it's easier for a 25 or 30 year old to ask for
something in no way am I condoning or anything cuz I mean I used to do . any graffiti writer
will tell you that if the if you do something illegally you don't expect it to stay. If
it stays well, You must have got a good spot
I got a good spot and I win or somebody's not going to clean it so in theory graffiti
should never be a problem if it's maintained and cleaned New York went through this in
the 80s with the Subways until they found a system to clean all the trains and do that
but you know New York City is used as an example too frequently when people to contact me the
table you know New York City when they got a hold of it. No they didn't, they never have,
the only difference is they invest an enormous amount of money into cleaning and they clean
all the time systematically If you’ve been wondering why the city is
looking a whole lot more colorful and not in a good way, well it’s because the budget
for removing graffiti has disappeared, and not everyone is happy about it.
I’m back! So this is broken window theory?
Yeah, but that’s what they understood, they understood they had to clean all the time
so the public isn't bothered by it and the people doing it get no visibility
So the thing that Sterling is talking about often gets called broken windows theory, but
in a graffiti prevention sense I actually see this cleaning as being more an an economic
solution to the problem. The whole illegal side of the equation is
not really fueled by wanting to learn an artform or anything high minded like that, that just
happens when you're doing it. It’s for me and other graffiti writers that
we can read it. All these other people who don’t write, they’re excluded, I don’t
care about them” What most are doing is making a name for themselves
and building credibility with their group of peers.
The other high school kids or whatever who are doing graffiti.
So Oh shit...umm, Bob.
There’s a high school kid called bob out there probably.
Oh shit Bob got up on that roof, and he bombed that fucking warehouse, it was huuuuuge.
Oh my god he’s so cool, let’s all try to suck his dick at once”
So if you are 14 year old Bob and you want to get your social capital with your friends,
popularity at that age. Your subculture’s social capital comes from
the visibility of your graffiti or your tags over time.
So you risk $8 in a can of paint (or you risk stealing it) and then risk being fined and
doing community service or whatever to get your visible tag up on some warehouse.
Every day the graffiti stays up Bob recoups his investment until someone covers it.
It could be the building owner with a roller, or another tagger going over top of it.
So the problem with the penalty heavy approach is it adds to the risk side of the equation,
and like a lot of things with risk, it has the effect of increasing reward.
These are mostly young men If Bob was facing jail time, for bombing the
warehouse as a teenager. Oh wow that is so cool”
If you banned Spray Paint, Bob would sneak it in from Ontario and then.
Oh cool, bob got illegal paint Bob would be getting his dick sucked right
off his pelvis. So that is why the solution is to focus on
the other side of the equation, that is where the rubber hits the road, it’s the return
on investment. Instead of increasing the risk, you got to
reduce the reward. You do this by removing the graffiti quickly, to prevent the investment
that bobs made being recouped. The faster you remove the graffiti, the less
Bob's friends will see it, and the less it’s going to pay out.
People are rational, they aren’t going to risk doing community service for tags that
no one that they know is ever going to see. I don’t think that stirling and I talked
about this but it’s pretty obvious he also has that like, rapid, be on top of it, don’t
fuck around get it cleaned up sort of attitude. So as a member of city council it tagging
on the new REM or something I wonder why it's not being cleaned up.
The REM isn't owned by the city so it's not our responsibility to clean it
When I look at the highway and that's the the minister of Transport Quebec which is
also a provincial project and is being built, the graffiti has never once been cleaned in
5 years and it's just accumulated we're not allowed to go clean that so even if we wanted
to go clean it we're not allowed to
And it was interesting to hear that there actually was a time where graffiti cleaning
was coordinated. There was a table that grouped together people
from transport Quebec Hydro Quebec Bell Canada Post Canada there was a concerted effort to
come up with a plan on how to proactively clean at the same time. Because if you've
got six different things on this street corner and I clean and the other five people don't
clean up the same time, then it doesn't look like I cleaned any graffiti there. So unless
everyone cleans at the same time or gives the permission to somebody to clean the other
services for them then then it's not it's not it's not done
Sorry, OK, that’s ah, alright. It is hard to understand why this panel isn’t
functioning anymore between the different levels of government
However we didn’t really get into it because we were both incredibly distracted by that
guy on the scooter thing. What the fuck is going on?
There is another way to handle graffiti though and that's on a more, kind of internal level,
and that is to find out more about it. It’s one of those things where the more familiar
you get with it the more it becomes a kind of interesting thing to look at in the city.
I’ve started to see this more with myself and architecture.
Architecture is another form of public art. We really like the classic stuff that we’ve
seen and it takes a long time for something new to catch on with regular people.
So for example after spending a lot of time filming the brutalism video I found I started
enjoying and even liking a type of architecture that I used to absolutely hate.
If you hate graffiti, it’s not going to go anywhere, so maybe if you’re really irritaged
by it, looking into it’s history and watching just a couple of documentaries on how it works
and where it comes from will help you find it a a little less annoying.
You know enough to get through your life without being infuriated by it.
But regardless, this stuff obviously sucks for business and building owners. I can’t
see a day where a business owner comes out of their building in the morning and say:
Oh, how blessed I am, some teenagers have written their names all over my business 15
times. I am a patron of the modern arts, and glad to be a part of their development in
graffiti as an artform. Oh, it’s like I’m in exit through the gift shop
I imagine that calling the city to come clean it off every few weeks is super annoying.
Interestingly enough though, the former vandal is the guy with the real solutions to this
problem for the city. I think that it’s probably time for the
government to form a replacement intergovernmental panel to work on this problem. But maybe they
could have a 2020 take on the problem. We definitely need to coordinate the cleanup
for reasons that you’ve heard. But to me in the 2020s that could be something different
than the broken windows inspired version that you’d have in the 90s.
Because nowadays I think a lot of people realize how talented these punks can be.
So why not modernize the painting program and instead of rollering everything white
pair the thousands of graffiti artists in town with walls and objects that really need
painting? So much of what makes graffiti look, not great,
is because it has to be done fast and often at night. We kind of make it so it has to
look shit. Imagine what it would look like if all the
pillars on the REM down the highway were something that someone had actually spent days on and
how much it would brighten the winter commute for people. Seeing this kind of changing public
art as they drive over the year. They’re going to tag the shit out of it anyway, but
I think we all now know in 2020 that the end result of that could look really really nice.
Artists could submit their names, and a few samples and the public could vote taking like
the top 50 submissions each year to repaint the oldest murals on bridges and viaducts
and that sort of thing. We were early on the graffiti festival, the
mural festival, but you know like what’s the next thing to innovate on? Could it be
Pillar Fest 2025. Anyway, just an idea.
So that’s a bit of a primer on the illegal scene in Montreal, but have you ever wanted
to try out graffiti without pissing people off?
Next time I’ll be talking about the options that you have if you’re interested in graffiti
and want to give it a go buy maybe want to avoid the whole running away from the police
and spending a night in jail or getting a fine or doing community service or being forced
to eat paint, i think they make you do that as well.
Well hello there, I’m just sitting here surrounded by some graffiti stuff. So. Sorry.
A bit too much to drink, too many belgium moons.
So you invest $8 in a can of paint, probably not this sort because it’s semi transparent.