The real graffiti struggle session is about the high percentage of graffiti artists who are middle aged white guys with trust funds
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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Like any hobby, the people with more disposable income and free time are the ones most likely to engage with it.
I would like to remind people that a middle aged white graffiti guy literally painted the Obama "Hope" poster (he later regretted it):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_%22Hope%22_poster
Interesting, I didn’t know that. Fairey also apparently made the “Obey” brand, which strikes a similar tone of liberal vaguery. He has also designed for a group called “Friends of Ai Weiwei” 
He has raised money for good causes too, so on the whole he’s one of the good ones I guess, just confused.
All graffiti, including tagging, is a person's expression of control over their environment. There is a reason why the suburbs aren't filled with it but the poorest places are, graffiti does not appear randomly, it appears most frequently in places where the people have the least control of their lives and this materially expresses itself in graffiti as an attempt at taking some control of anything they possibly can.
edit: I would go so far as to say it is a natural feature of struggle, in the places where the most struggle is occurring, and to dismiss it is also to dismiss the people that are in the material conditions that are most likely to benefit from becoming organised. These people are some of the very most likely to be communists if you could only reach them with theory.
Gang graffiti (tagging) is real and marks the territory.
Since the advent of AI, my respect for Graffiti artists has only gone up, it's one of the few forms of self expression that the capitalists can't replace, they can only censor it.
I'm all for doing it yet again, but it's not really a new struggle session...
Graffiti struggle session 6 years ago
Graffiti struggle session 3 months ago
It's happened in between, too. It's just not as famous as the rock-stacking struggle session. I think we're starting to get to the "Simpson already did it" stage of hexbear. If it can be struggled over, we probably have done it in some form or another by now.
is graffiti supposed to be the struggle sesh here because that is dope as fuck
you could have at least picked graffiti that's like a stick figure with a large weiner or something because shit I'd love to have the massive neon green fungus tree clutching a crumbling heart with a butterfly on it on my house
unless the struggle sesh here gonna be everyone thinking this is rad as fuck while OP smugly assures everyone that it isn't actually rad 🤔
unless the struggle sesh here gonna be everyone thinking this is rad as fuck while OP smugly assures everyone that it isn't actually rad
Erm actually if you think graffiti is cool you're probably some antisocial child who should just pick up a pen and paper, that would be real art 
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That or low effort tags that run the cool stuff.
Low effort tags left over the top of some incredible street art.
Putting "PENIS MAN" over a Banksy would only be rad because Banksy is a smuglord. Don't paint a bunch of dicks over your local 10 story mural.
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The actual strugglesesh to be had about graffiti is, as you say, butt-ugly stuff + graffiti that covers the windows of public transport. That pisses me off.
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Someone wrote 'mamas milk' on my building's dumpster and I'm dying to know what it means. At first I paid no attention to it. But after each trip taking out he garbage the mystery grows in my mind.
That's about the extent of my strongly held opinions on this topic.
without looking at the dumpster in question I'm going to assume that "mama's milk" is just that person's tag name. People choose wacky names sometimes. Like someone in my area is apparently named "sand-bbq" and another just named "tooth." I saw one giant tag on the side of a train years ago, like an elaborate piece across the whole train car, that said "Syrup Shark" and that has been stuck in my head ever since as probably the best tag name of all time. The winner for worst alias of all time is definitely the tagger remüv, best known for tagging the opposite side of the prominent BE SOMEONE piece over the I-45 in Houston. Well it's probably not the worst of all time, but it's obnoxious for me personally to see the words 'remüv "hate" :)' when i'm already annoyed by driving a car in Houston.
And I think that's beautiful.
I missed the stacking rocks struggle sesh so we could do that one again I don't understand either side of it.
People were shitting and pissing themselves because they were taught about the concept of "leave No Trace" + given very good reasons to do so.
Like the equivalent of a classroom full of med students being told "First, do no harm" and deciding to leave a haemostat in every patient, even the non-surgical ones.
They all ask "what if doing harm is good for my mental health?" and even though it isn't they will pretend it is
Smh that's so sadophobic, how dare you.
That barely none of them was banned for that bullshit pissed me off
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Most American this site has been. Well that and the micro-sessions about being an inconsiderate asshole that listens to music on a loudspeaker on public transport/rides a loud motorbike at night near apartment complexes.
Point: the loud motorbikes and street races wake me and my family up during the middle of the night but counterpoint: I imagine that the people doing that stuff are having a really great time living the wild street life I always dreamed about as a youth so I'm actually kinda ok with it.
Street races are cool, just don't have right next to large residential areas. If you do that then you're a dickhead. Especially at night.
Also street races aren't all that cool because cars suck and they're rarely done in a way that takes sufficient safety measures in use.
If you buy a loud motorbike while living in the city, when there's so many options for not-loud motorbikes, then you're also a dickhead.
Awl korrect there, no doubt!
But I simply cannot be convinced that underground street racing isn't cool. Should we as a society allow it? Probably not. But it is still very rad and there's no changing that aspect of it.
If you are a guy and do underground street racing I will instantly fall for you. So consider that.
(shuffles a big pile of paper around frantically to find and complete that underground-street-racing school application I've been putting off for years)
https://hexbear.net/post/249555
The OP gives the correct side. The other side is basically, "Fuck you, I'll do what I want." (Yes, really.)
Struggle sessions always come down to this, one side saying "this thing can be harmful, so try not to do it" and the other side insists that "My treats are the most important thing on the planet and how dare you, you want the revolution to fail by making me have to abandon a thing I do solely for fun that can inconvenience hundreds of people or destroy the natural environment and you're literally the worst person on earth if you suggest I pick up healthier and less disruptive hobbies or make any sort of compromise with my behaviour to make other people's lives easier." 
I'm honestly surprised Hexbear didn't have an AI struggle session like Lemmygrad did. It ticks all the boxes of struggle session material, except that it is new I guess, maybe that's the deciding factor.
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Oh shit this is where the "oxygen used to be poison" tagline comes from!
Thanks for thr history lesson
If you want to find strugglesessions just hit "sort by controversial". Since we no longer have downbears you'll only get really old stuff
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I have a lot of admiration for steet art. A lot of semi-famous graffiti artists and crews originate from the city I grew up in, and I went to school and have mutual friends with a lot of the bigger names in the local graffiti scene. Its one of the few remaining raw expressions of disobedient artistic expressions that we have that also forces the viewer to observe or react without restriction to art galleries/museums.
Wreak havoc on the middle class
Is it about the set design of the Joel Schumaker Batman movies? Cause thats what this looks like and it looks cool
There really should be more graffiti with black lights
The only graffiti that passes me off is the tags with no artistic effort, just simple tags, especially repeated in a row along a wall or barrier. I love inventive and creative graffiti, just miss me with the "I was here" equivalents
Meh, it's a thing we've been doing forever. Dudes left handprints in caves. A Viking left graffiti in the Hagia Sophia.
People have been shitting in the street forever, doesn't make it a good thing though.
I think its fine to have opinions on graffiti. My issue is when people get insufferable over it. And honestly, there is usually a lot to unpack there and I say that as someone who has been there done that.
As I said in a different post. Art which yes even the "low skill" stuff is. (I say smugly with my ask me about the Heavnor Runestones shirt) is just a part of what we do. And people don't have a good outlit. No amount of policing or moralizing is going to stop. So it just makes more sense to accept it as a natural thing we do, study it and figure out how to channel that tendency for the betterment of the community to reduce tagging in places that most would prefer it not being there.
Hell I say this as someone who HATES random ass dick pics everywhere. But here is the thing I know. Most people can generally agree that having random ass dick drawings or tagging in certain places is annoying and can even be harmful. So it makes for a very easy bar to clear with reactionary forces and suddenly you got more money going to the cops.
Its why its so important that we accept this and come at it with clear heads. And who knows, if we do that we might get some awesome stuff for everyone out of it. Though of course I would hope I'm preaching to the choir here.
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