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I'm an artist, educator, militant anti-theist , and I write. I gamble on just about anything. And I like beer...but I love my wife. This blog contains observations from a funny old man who gets pissed off every once in a while.

Monday, January 10, 2011

<<<< ON GRAFFITI >>>>>

I came upon this image the other day and it pissed me off. I considered the perpetrators stupid and selfish to mar our appreciation of the beauty of the place for their own amusement.

It was the same feeling I got when I saw spray painted peace signs (now removed) on Stonehenge...

And on Cadillac Ranch...although it is so far out in the middle of nowhere, the graffiti may have been the artist's intent all along.

But when they were cleaning Stonehenge they came upon more permanent damage.

Ah, but it is not just our generation that left their mark on the monument...


And come to find out EVERY monument has graffiti.
I could show you hundreds of examples, but these first two are in Egypt...
...and this one is somewhere else.

Then I got to thinking about why people all over the world, in each generation has an urge to deface things.

This work by early cavemen is no less graffiti than the other examples I've shown you.

As are the pictoglyphs in Australia.

And these cave walls in France.

Here's my theory. People just like to leave marks to let people know they have been there. Had the guy who scratched the goat below had written language, I am SURE he would have left his name instead, as did the modern visitor MML.


But why is it that monuments are so often vandalized? I contend that it is because that's where the people go. What good is it to write something in the middle of the forest where no one goes? I think that in every example above, the location was selected for maximum viewership.

The same for this horse. Put it on the side of a hill and more people will see it. And trust me, had these people had language this would have read HOLLYWOOD.
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