lba
Hippie Van
Tagging is so bad in our city that we're actually mural capital of Canada - why? Because murals help deter vandals. There are some places downtown where nearly every building has a mural. Pretty cool, actually. Although a lot of them are not very good, since they're just done to keep away taggers.
But I guess people want to make their mark on the world and it's easier to destroy than to create. That's the only reason I can see to scrawl PEAR on everything in the city.
Unfortunately, here it doesn't help. The city is so against anything remotely related to graffiti that even murals have gotten a bad rap. So when people want to put up a mural, it takes months to get approval and even then you're limited to certain materials and censored on what you can put up. So a lot of people who want them just do it illegally and for some reason, people can sense when it's not a legitimate mural and just tag it more. I wish it could be like that here though. I'd love for this city to be covered in murals. It makes me want to move back to a city that's in such bad shape that nobody cares if you paint abandoned buildings.
How odd! I'm not sure how it happened, but every little restaurant or business downtown here seems to have a mural.
What seems to happen here sometimes is that one ne'er-do-well will go and write their name on a mural that's been there, untouched, for years, and after that other people follow. That happened recently with one of my favourite old murals downtown. :(
It's funny how those taggers still have some sort of guilt like that, though. There's a place near my home where there's a very thin space between two buildings: a bank and a church. The back of the bank has huge tags scrawled all over it, and the church, right beside it, only has one tiny blue “+”.
I found a website about our murals, actually.
http://www.themuralsofwinnipeg.com/