The other day after taking a taxi to meet some friends for lunch I decided to walk home because the weather was nice and this took me down a road that I have never walked on before. About halfway down the road every space was covered in mostly terrible graffiti that I hesitate to even call art outside of a few of the pieces.
A lot of this looks as though it has been here for a very long time and there used to be a mostly outdoors bar here that a certain weed-oriented group of clientele used to frequent. I went there one but it was at night so I never noticed the tags on the walls opposite where the businesses are.
Some of it, like this one, almost qualify as art in my view, but I also really feel as though tags are kind of lazy, no matter what kind of font you think you just made up.
This one I appreciate a great deal more and would have liked to have seen it when it was new and before the sun had faded it to the point of not really even being recognizable.
Most of it, unfortunately, was just trash like these two and in my mind this qualifies and vandalism and requires little to no talent in order to do it.
Vietnam is actually quite harsh on Vandals so how do they get away with it? Well, in this instance I think that nobody really cared because the fence that this is painted on is surrounding a long abandoned hospital of some sort and even though the land appears as though it could potentially be worth a lot of money due to its proximity to the sea. It is government owned land though and if there is one thing I have noticed about the Vietnamese government it is that they don't let go of their land really ever. There are a ton of unused or underused government buildings over here that they could probably sell of a millions upon millions of dollars but the government just doesn't seem to be all that interested in such things.
one of the largest government buildings in the city is in this area, one of which they apparently had very high hopes for because it has a helicopter landing pad on top of it but I have walked or rode past that building hundreds of times and I have never so much as seen a single person in or around it.
So that's probably why the government kind of turns a blind eye towards the street art and/or vandals. Everyone kind of knows that at some point in time all of this is going to be torn down and it has no value.
This doesn't mean that I think it is ok that people did this. I still am a firm believer that no matter what your talent level is, if you paint on someone else's property, you are an asshole.
It's unfortunate that this is not of better quality though because this street could have been some sort of art gallery of sorts and well, it probably still could be if someone went along and painted over all this trash and then hired actual artists to do it again.