I was quite thrilled with the addition of the new very large street-art installation that recently went up on the new-ish building that is nearby where I live and I have written rather extensively in the past that there is a huge difference between street art and vandalism.
For one thing, the vandalism is done without permission. Sometimes I will see something that was done without permission and I have mixed feelings if it is still good. For one thing, I appreciate good street art but it annoys me thinking that the person who owns the property didn't ask for this. In public places the street art might look good to some, but this is still something that was not asked for and therefore even if it looks good, I am opposed to it if it was done without permission. I think the people that do that are the scum of the earth. I think about how hard my own father used to work when I was a kid and how heartbroken he would be if someone were to all of a sudden spray paint our property. It would just be more work he would have to do in his already packed schedule...and it would cost money.
In Da Nang there is a lot of spray tags all over the place and unfortunately most of them are just ugly garbage. Most of the people who do these have at least got the good graces to only spray on abandoned buildings or on temporary structures such as corrugated steel fences they put around construction sites.
But other people are jerks and just do it anywhere that they can. These are the kind of people that if I ever witnessed it happening I would go out of my way to film them and then follow them to whatever transport they used to get there. People like that deserve to be busted and I would imagine that Vietnam has pretty stiff penalties for these sorts of violations just like they do for almost anything else illegal.
Here are some examples of things I would "bust "the people for if I saw them doing it.
This is effortless trash that was obviously done in a hurry because it is illegal and they obviously didn't have permission to do it. Nobody would want this on their property and I hope both of these people get identified and arrested. The thing about doing a tag is that if you get busted for one, the police have a pretty good idea who did the other ones that look exactly the same. Multiple infractions hopefully means jail time.
These I am on the fence about. This plot of land here is clearly not being used and is a dumping ground of sorts as well but then again, I hope the people that illegally dump trash on land that is not their also get busted.
The one in the middle that has "scam" written under it is a telegram number that is seen all over the city. It is for buying weed, which is illegal in this country too. How that distributor is able to get away with that is beyond me. It seems like the police could quite easily make a purchase and bust the person doing it. I don't know why they don't.
The eye looking thing towards the end actually looks like it could have been ok if the people had more time but it was clearly a rush job because again, they do not have permission to do this.
There's the weed telegram people again. As I said that is all over the place. The blue one on the end looks as thought it was cut off midway through the procedure because this is the back of a hotel and also an alleyway that leads to a minimart. There is quite a lot of foot traffic and I hope that whoever was doing any of these got some sort of beat down while they were doing it.
Maybe I am a puritan as far as this is concerned because I was brought up being told to respect other people's property and I can't really put myself into the mind of a person that doesn't have this level of respect. How can you deface someone else's property? Well you probably have never had any of your own and therefore don't know what it would be like to have it defaced.
This level of selfishness is really annoying to me and if that is part of the street art culture it is one that I will never get on board with. I love street art, I hate vandalism and would participate in helping the police bust the people that do it.
Understand the difference?