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The legality of work - are you stealing someone else's work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8U8W79AHzg
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Since the days of Andy Warhol, fair use has been a hot topic in art. In recent times, artists like Shepard Fairey have revived the debate over what constitutes fair use.

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What is the difference between writing on a cave wall and a bathroom stall?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABanksy_Pressure_Washing_Away_Art.jpg

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The Art Assignment - PBS Digital Studios https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9neybpOvjaQ
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How to Critique  | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios

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Attributed to xk3D
CC BY-NC 2.5

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Destroying the Wall to Get Rid of the Graffiti

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Destroying the Wall to Get Rid of the Graffiti

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Authored by Darian Pavli
A version of this piece was originally published in Spanish on the website of El Pais, the Spanish newspaper, on November 21, 2013.

CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

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A recent judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has generated a great deal of debate in Europe over holding an online portal legally responsible for offensive comments made by its readers.

Interestingly, the judgment has found some support outside Europe, including the unconditional endorsement provided by Diego Garcia Sayan, president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in a recent column (in Spanish) published in El Pais. Garcia Sayan is certainly in a good position to evaluate the rulings of a sister human rights tribunal. However, it is surprising that his column makes no mention of the unusually vigorous criticism that the European court's ruling has attracted for what it means for online free speech.

The case, Delfi v. Estonia, involved comments, some of them anonymous, left by users on the Delfi portal below an article about a ferry service disrupting ice roads, which are a cheaper and more convenient means of transportation for Estonian islanders in the Northern winter. A few of the comments were highly offensive of one of the ferry company's managers. The European Court concluded that the portal could be held legally liable for having failed in its supposed duty to prevent publication of the offensive comments.

However, Garcia Sayan does not mention that the portal removed the insulting comments the same day that they received a complaint from the company's lawyers. In addition, the manager chose to send the complaint by regular mail, even though the portal had provided a one-click button on the website for reporting abusive comments. In other words, it is hard to conclude that Delfi, which does not edit or preview the 10,000 comments it receives each day, acted as an irresponsible publisher when it had provided an easy and effective means of denouncing and removing any unlawful comments.

But, beyond the factual omissions, the bigger issue with President Garcia Sayan's argument is the failure to pursue it to its logical conclusion.

What his column is advocating is, essentially, strict liability for all websites that carry user-generated content. To evade liability, they would need to set up a system capable of preventing any defamatory comments from appearing in the first place, even for a few hours or minutes. Such a duty would be imposed on all operations, no matter how big or small-from Facebook to your favorite small-town blogger. These filtering systems would inevitably become an instrument of prior censorship, including of legitimate speech. Very few online operations can afford the army of lawyers required to totally "cleanse" all user content of potential illegalities, so they would err on the side of caution: sanitizing all comments that "might cross the line."

This may not be an existential issue for big news operations in the rich world. It would strike hardest, however, those online sources that Garcia Sayan acknowledges have played a crucial role in democratizing information in the digital age: independent voices in countries where the mainstream media are tightly controlled by the government or in the hands of the few.

To bring just one example, a similar ruling by a Thai court forced the country's leading online portal, Prachatai, to shut down its user forums for a good while. With only half a dozen staff, the site had no way of screening an average of 10,000 daily comments in real time. And Prachatai's manager received a suspended prison sentence for not acting quickly enough to remove a comment deemed insulting of the Thai monarchy.

Unfortunately, a similar scenario cannot be ruled out in Latin America, where judges and legislators have been too slow to adapt traditional rules of publisher liability to the distinct dynamics of the Internet. Furthermore, a recent ruling of the court led by Garcia Sayan, decided by a slim (4-3) majority-which Jose Miguel Vivanco rightly critiqued in El Pais as a " serious setback "-for free speech in the Americas-for the first time ever upheld a prison sentence against a reporter that denounced a case of mismanagement of public assets. One can only hope that this case will be remembered as an aberration in the history of the court's free speech jurisprudence.

It is worth noting, as many commentators have done, that the Delfi judgment of the European Court goes in the opposite direction of prevailing tendencies in the democratic world. In both the European Union and the United States, website operators are not generally held liable for infringements by third parties-the same way you cannot, in the words of a British judge, hold the owner of a wall liable for graffiti sprayed on it in the middle of the night.

Finally, a word on the rights of common Internet users. The strict liability approach promoted by President Garcia Sayan would likely mean an end for anonymous comments, since websites would be very reluctant to assume such liability for comments left by users that cannot be identified. Anonymity is a complex matter, and surely some users will use it as a shield for spewing invective. However, as a recent study by the World Association of Newspapers found, many editors around the world consider that anonymous comments greatly enrich and democratize online debates. And one does not need to live in North Korea to appreciate the value of anonymity. Next time you are about to make an online comment that you don't want to broadcast to your employer, your government officials or even your mother, think about what is at stake in this debate.

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When a Human Rights Judge Wants to Limit Online Comment

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A recent judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has generated a great deal of debate in Europe over holding an online portal legally responsible for offensive comments made by its readers.

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Authored by Melissa Thibault
CC BY-NC-SA 2.5

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Whether they see art at school, in books, on television, in galleries, in public places, or in museums, students need guidance to do more than glance at a work and make quick judgments about it. Learning to look requires the skills and vocabulary to make observations, build understanding, and respond effectively to art.

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Describing graffiti and what it used to be and what it could be.
Video provided by Kelly Wall from TEDED Lessons Worth Sharing
(CC BY -- NC -- ND 4.0 International)

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Is graffiti art? Or vandalism? - Kelly Wall

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When looking at this image, what do you think of? Is this the defacing of property for fun or is it a message to society?

Image courtesy of Alan Stanton
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABanksy_or_not%3F_-High_Rd_-Tottenham_-London-24Sept2009.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0

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Works from the famous and anonymous Banksy

Provided by Just a Platform
(CC BY 4.0)

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This month there is a great chance to see some original Banksy works on canvas and art objects which have been sourced from private collections from all over the world. The free exhibition will be showing at the Andipa gallery space in Knightsbridge in association with War Child, the charity for children affected by conflict.

The Andipa Banksy exhibition will be showing a selection of works including original canvas paintings, sculptures, iconic prints and rare unseen objects that were part of the Banksy War, Capitalism and Liberation exhibition that was on at the Palazzo Cipolla in Rome this summer and which attracted 500,000+ visitors in just over 3 months.

From iconic pieces such as the chilling 'Kids On Guns' canvas and Banksy's Kate Moss remix of Warhol's Marilyn, to earlier unknown oil paintings on canvas such as 'Rubber Duck', this exhibition offers the public an intimate look at some of the most important works of art by one of today's most exciting and relevant contemporary artists. Although a free exhibition there is a suggested donation on entry of £5 with 100% of donations going to War Child UK.

Coming out of the Bristol underground scene, Banksy and his work, from his provocative street art and public stunts , have made him a globally recognised artist while all the while remaining anonymous.

"It's so exciting to see such a large number of works coming back home [to London] to go on display. It is a monumental collection brought together for the first time and I cannot wait to open our gallery to the public," said Acoris Andipa, Director, Andipa Gallery.

What is the most expensive Banksy painting?

In 2008 during a charity auction in New York, Banksy's Keep It Spotless painting went for a cool $1.87 million.
http://andipa.com www.warchild.org.uk
Banksy books
Banksy Wall and Piece
Existencilism
Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall

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This month there is a great chance to see some original Banksy works on canvas and art objects which have been sourced from private collections from all over the world. The free exhibition will be showing at the Andipa gallery space in Knightsbridge in association with War Child, the charity for children affected by conflict.

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Graffiti can be more than words.  It can be an art form which has traveled across oceans.

Authored by Klaus Luber from Goethe Institute

CC BY-SA 3.0 DE

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Multi-coloured lettering on high-rise buildings, gigantic figures painted over in black out of protest, advertising with wall paintings - graffiti in Berlin has many faces. Goethe.de invites you on a special walk through the city.

Since the arrival of the American graffiti movement in Germany in the mid-1980s, Berlin has been one of the most diverse street art metropolises in the world. In the western part of the city, divided from the eastern part until 1989, there prevailed a favourable attitude towards the new youth culture. For one thing, graffiti tied in with a tradition of leftist protest movements that used house walls as the bearers of political messages and had long been present in the cityscape; for another, at the disposal of the newly emerging street art stood one of the most suitable carrier media imaginable - the Berlin Wall. It was completely covered with graffiti already in the 1980s.

Following German reunification, the city became even more interesting for the scene because of the high vacancy rate and unclarified ownership of many houses. The post-Wall period offered numerous legal, or at least tolerated, spraying surfaces, so-called "Halls of Fame". The amount, variety and quality of the graffiti made Berlin a popular destination for international graffiti artists.

In the meantime, the art form has been refined in a variety of ways. It reception too has been subject to constant change. The purely typographic form of classical graffiti is still a matter of controversy, while unlike the sprayed name tags ("tags") and resultant lettering images ("pieces"), so-called "street artworks" are held in high esteem by a broad public to whom they are expressly addressed. To the latter belong above all the sometimes elaborately composed wall pictures, so-called "murals", which are increasingly being created as legally commissioned images. But a scene that operates illegally is also still active, and is committed to the original idea of graffiti as an urban political statement directed against the growing privatization and commercialization of public space.

In cooperation with the Graffiti Archive / Archive of Youth Culture e.V., Goethe.de has compiled ten interesting examples of Berlin street art, which in effect tell a story about both the art and the city.

Berlin Not for Sale (2014) by the orangotango Collective, Pappsatt and Reclaim Your City (Deutschland)

On a house façade in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg, several graffiti collectives created in the summer of 2014 a wall painting that depicts the current conflicts over gentrification in this part of the city. The picture recalls a Monopoly game and visualizes various strategies of resistance against privatization and expulsion: rent protests, noise demonstrations, squatting, blockading of evictions and other means of appropriatg urban space. The clear political message and its graphic realization link up with a tradition of public intervention that has very little to do with the coded language of American graffiti typography. This leftist political façade art, with its slogans sprayed on house walls, was especially popular during the student movement at the end of the 1960s. Another reference is to the Latin American tradition of so-called "Muralismo", in which the history of leftist protest is recorded and passed on in large-format murals.
Location: self-managed house project in Manteuffelstraße 39, Berlin-Kreuzberg

Cuvry Graffiti (2007/8), by BLU (Italy)

The best-known graffiti in the so-called "Curvy wasteland" are the two large-scale façade pictures ("murals") by the Italian street artist BLU at the edge of a long-unused building plot. In 2007 BLU created two white figures who are trying to look under each other's mask; in 2008 he added a headless figure wearing chained-together watches on its wrists. Both recall the incipient commercialization and difficulties of the coalescing Berlin of the post-Wall period. The area of approximately 12,000 square metres was part of a controversial building project and the object of repeated urban political clashes. The premises were used in the meantime as temporary living space and then cleared in 2014 after a fire. In protest against Berlin's urban development policy, and fearing the co-opting of his art by the future owner of the property, BLU had the mural painted over in black in December 2014. In January 2017, construction work began for an office complex on the site.
Location: Cuvrystraße, Berlin-Kreuzberg

The Yellow Man (2007) by Os Gêmeos (Brazil)

The large-format wall painting was created in 2007 as part of the graffiti festival Backjumps, one of the most important graffiti and street art exhibition projects in Berlin, which has given many international artists legal access to large wall surfaces. The Yellow Man is by the Brazilian street art duo Os Gêmeos. The identical twins are, along with artists such as Banksy, among the internationally best-known exponents of street art. Large parts of the picture are painted with normal coating paint, as is common in Brazil because of the relatively high price of spray cans. Os Gêmeos works with motifs referring to the indigenous Brazilian population and the rebellious roots of graffiti in the country; their hallmark is large, often masked figures. The works are now displayed at big art festivals and art galleries. Although Os Gêmeos now also accept highly remunerative and prestigious commissions, they continue to see themselves committed to the tradition of social-critical street art.
Location: Oppelner Str. 3, Berlin-Kreuzberg

Bierpinsel (2011), by Flying Förtress, Honet, Sozyone, Craig KR Costello (international)

The forty metres-high, futuristic building, built in 1976, is one of the few preserved architectural concept-buildings from this period. Its nickname, "Bierpinsel" (Beer Brush), already stuck in the year of its opening, 1976, owing to the building's form and predominantly gastronomic use. With the exception of small art actions and events, the Bierpinsel has been vacant since 2006. In 2011 it and the immediately adjacent Underground station Schlossstraße was made free at the initiative of an art project to international graffiti artists. Remarkable is that some of the sprayers were at the time known for their illegal work. In the course of a general renovation of the building, it is planned to remove the graffiti. The Bierpinsel has been a listed building since 2017.
Location: Schlossstraße, Berlin-Steglitz

Face Time (2015), by Various & Gould (Germany)

The portrait, composed of patchwork faces, is part of the series Face Time, which the artist duo Various & Gould describe as a character study in the form of collaged, photofit-like heads. The aim is the creation of Dadaist patchwork identities, which undermine the common beau ideal and celebrate human diversity. The 350 square metre mural was developed in consultation with the Berlin architectural office that is responsible for constructing a new housing estate in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Such collaborations are generally not viewed uncritically in the graffiti scene, since they have little in common with its basic idea of re-appropriating urban space. The artists, however, who have taken up socially relevant issues in their work, had a free hand in designing the picture, in contrast to graffiti artists who implement stipulated commissions by clients.
Location: Heinrich-Heine-Str. 73, Berlin-Kreuzberg

Façade of the East-Side-Hotel (since 2014) by various artists

Unlike the Face-Time façade mural by Various & Gould, the wall paintings of the Berlin design studio XI-Design are well-remunerated advertising commissions. XI-Design, which is run by a tattoo artist and two former sprayers, specializes in realizing graffiti-style ads on house walls. At the beginning of 2017, it had about 100 walls on offer nation-wide, eighty of them in Berlin. If a deal is struck, XI-Design then hires freelance graffiti artists to carry out the commission. The murals are of the highest craftsmanship and can as a rule, though not invariably, be recognized as advertising. In the scene, contract agencies such as XI-Design are controversial. The company is given credit, however, for using the revenues from advertising deals to fund projects that support the independent scene.
Location: Mühlenstraße 6, Berlin Kreuzberg

Hall of Fame, Mauerpark (since 1989) by various artists

The Mauerpark (Berlin Wall Park) was originally a part of the so-called "death strip" along the Berlin Wall, which was transformed into a green area in 1994. The death strip was the area between the actual Wall on the west side and a smaller, so-called "hinterland wall" on the east side. Part of this hinterland wall has been used by graffiti artists since the site was made publicly accessible in 1989. Though the Wall is now a protected monument, using it for graffiti has been tolerated without individual written permission since 2014. At present the Mauerpark is the largest and best known "Hall of Fame" (legal spraying surface) in Berlin and a popular venue for various graffiti events.
Location: Mauerpark, Gleimstraße 55, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg

Interbrigadas - façade of the Mercure Hotel (2009) by various artists

The mural on the outer wall of the hotel in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg is one of the largest wall paintings in the city. It was created at the initiative of the Berlin-based association Interbrigadas, which has been committed to inter-cultural exchange between Europe and Latin America since 2006. The picture shows the confluence of various cultural trends and stylistic directions. Prominently represented are the figurative depictions popular amongst Brazilian street artists. Another reference is a special graffiti typography, also developed in Brazil, which is reminiscent of runes - the so-called "Pichação". These tags, oriented to the typographic tradition, have a bad image in Brazil, but have found many adherents in Europe.
Location: Mercure Hotel, Luckenwalder Straße 11, 10963 Berlin

High-rise at Kottbusser Tor (2012), by Berlin Kidz (Germany)

In its early form, graffiti was often considered a sort of extreme sport. The Berlin-based graffiti crew Berlin Kidz, who since about 2010 have been causing a great stir in the scene with spectacular actions, link up with this tradition. A case in point is their abseiling down high-rise roofs and train surfing. In addition to these highly dangerous actions, which require plenty of acrobatic skill and courage, the Berlin Kidz are lauded by the scene for their harking back to the political and rebellious elements of graffiti movement. The graffiti art of the crew is also oriented to the American beginnings of sprayed writing, part of whose inspiration evidently is to create the most distinctive style possible: arabesque-like tags in hues of red and blue, which snake along house walls like tattoos and seem almost filigree in the cityscape.
Location: Kottbusser Tor, Berlin-Kreuzberg

Tommy-Weisbecker-Haus (1989) by various artists

The wall paintings of the Tommy Weisbecker House in Berlin-Kreuzberg, recall the tradition of leftist protest slogans and symbols in West Berlin in the late 1960s. The peace symbol, today known worldwide, emerged back then as a European precursor of graffiti emblazoned on house walls. The history of the Tommy Weisbecker House also goes back to this time. In 1973 it was occupied by squatters and used as a self-managed housing collective, which also offered accommodation for the homeless. The name refers to the leftist radical Thomas (Tommy) Weisbecker, who was killed in a police action in the same year. The house was long considered a hotbed of leftist terrorist conspiracy. In the early 1980s it was finally recognized as a youth housing community. The motifs of the wall painting are based on central ideas of the leftist intellectual tradition: the dumbing down of people by the mass media and liberation through the return to nature. In addition to being the site of the impressive political mural, the left side of the house also serves today as a Hall of Fame.
Location: Wilhelmstraße 9, Berlin-Kreuzberg

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Multi-coloured lettering on high-rise buildings, gigantic figures painted over in black out of protest, advertising with wall paintings - graffiti in Berlin has many faces. Goethe.de invites you on a special walk through the city. Since the arrival of the American graffiti movement in Germany in the mid-1980s, Berlin has been one of the most diverse street art metropolises in the world.