Every week another challenge. And who would we be to refuse?
LET ME SET THE
scene. We went to Gore for the day. Gore is a small town that until fairly recently was famous for its youth, bored kids who crawled out of the woodwork at night—kids who became known as ‘Gorons’. A local name for a universal product.
A no-holds-barred policing policy sorted them out but a few bits of their legacy live on, sometimes under bridges where other trolls dwell—
—and on a bright spring morning it’s hard to catch the ‘art’ work without taking liberties with exposures and stuff. This is the surviving part of an earlier road bridge over the local river. LOOK: I know it’s fashionable to consider (okay, to spout that you consider) such vandalism as ‘folk art’ but to me it’s nothing but colour-muck spread by the talentless. The purveyors of this ‘art’ belong in the same asylums as the guys who blow up ancient Buddha statues, or smash ‘heathen idols’ in mid-Eastern museums. Bleuch.
AND ALWAYS
their great works contain wannabe swastikas. Young hoons apparently all admire Nazis and Naziism, no end. One can forgive pignorance* in the unsophisticated but surely if they’re going to spray symbols on structures they could get them right? (Yer actual Nazi swastika as a burning cross rotates anti-clockwise.)
Possibly a hundred years or more ago engineers and clever chaps with theodolites and mathematical tables did lots of sums and built the bridge, in the course of which they installed flood gauges.
Flash forward to today’s youth and you get these sprayed on desecrations—which the Politically Correct assure us are ‘folk art’ (and the vibrant expressions of frustrated creative youth). Yeah, right.
Moving on …
An unfair comparison: the old bridge on the left there, the more recent current bridge on the right/overhead as we stand; monuments to the past — and some great modern artworks adding class to the otherwise crass commercial functionality.
I know it’s art—true art evokes emotions, no?
And we have to be careful how we treat it, even with cameras …
.
NIL DESPICABALO
* Pignorance = pig ignorance
RAGNAROK or BUST 
Although…as photography can be considered art, does not the snapping of such vandalising render such as art…? Just thinking aloud… very echoey in here…
I think of myself more as a recorder, sometimes.
When Wossisname’s Pieta was nose-chipped by someone a few years ago, he (the chipper, not the chippee) was just another artist expressing himself, perhaps. Maybe the fire-bombing of Dresden was a work of art too.
Hah! Found it …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laszlo_Toth
… good ol’ Google~!
To answer, no, I don’t think that even the most artistic treatment of an unsavoury subject can make that subject ‘art’. The photo might well be, yes, but the topic? No … even artistically rendered a snap of a sick dog’s runny poops will still put some folks off their brekkies.
However, to Toth’s credit or discredit, he was clinacally bonkers. Mind you, considering the effects of puberty on some such deviant behaviour as vandalising a perfectly good bridge might be seen as an act of madness. At the very least it is an act of war, against what who knows, as rarely does anything ever come of it other than to upset those not so predisposed to rally against the establishment…I suppose we all find our way of seeking level ground and taking the bull by the horns. Some of us just choose more inconspicuous means, no? 😉
There’s the thrill of being anti-social, too. In the absence of a good war and the opportunity to be a commando sneaking up on Hun sentries and slitting their throats I guess they do the next best thing …
Well said. Also slightly less gruesome to daub graffiti on an old bridge…throat slitting can be so overrated.