Yeah, I had higher hopes for this thread.

I thought this thread was going to be about Vinyl players recording conversations of their previous owners and ever so quietly etching them onto the record.

ha ha!

Or subtly etching a picture of their face onto the run-out...

I agree. I even hate dog-eared pages.

Beyond the occasional initials of the previous owner on the label, I don't think any used LP or CD I've bought has really had anything of the previous owner's in or on it. And I've bought a lot of the used stuff. I think this is mostly because I buy from record stores that pretty much just sell unsoiled and near perfect copies.

Sure, that's so convenient and pleasant to borrow a book and then discover that it's unreadable because idiots wrote comments or underlined words all over it...

yeah, they are "just books"

spoken like a true aliterate.

My friend's brother bought a PJ Harvey CD which for some reason had a poster of Steven Tyler folded up inside it. He proceeded to hang it upside down on his wall. Probably for the best really...

tagging is the world's oldest art-form, you just dont like it personally and that is fine, but know that writing/carving/painting yr name on walls is the oldest visual art form of humanity.

spitting pigment onto your hand so it leaves a trace on a rock or cave wall is NOT the same as endlessly writing down some stupid fucking 4-8 letter "tag" on public buildings, bridges, houses, fencing, light poles etc.

tags are NOT art. they are low-level graffitti, in the pejorative sense.

actualy grafftti art can be beautiful and very much art, but just writing your "name" over and over again? that is what children do.

dude, they are the EXACT same fucking thing. you can walk along old roman trade roads in Turkey and find thousands of people's names etched in stone, just their fucking name, just like the hit ups all over the world. why are you so anti-graf to begin with? whats the harm?

Tagging a library book is just destruction, pure and simple. Who wants to come to new book and find it adulturated with somebody elses insights, good or bad? That sucks. Libraries are there to preserve cultural artifacts of all kinds so that everyone can enjoy them, and all the so-called tagging does is degrade that effort.

Agreed. 'Tagging' in terms of grafitti is a territorialism, not an artform, and it makes sense within that context. I might not like it, but I accept it. Writing on a book that is common property (that is, desecrating public property that you've paid for by taxes etc) doesn't assert anything other that your own idiocy and disregard for other people's preferences. Sheer arrogance, and lacking in the arrogance that constitutes tagging as territorial.

that is NOT art. it is just names on walls. it is neat archeologically, and sociologically, but not art.

I love graffitti ART

I hate tagging.

it is the lowest, meanest, hoodlum bullshit end of the graffiti spectrum

this I call art



this, is just some assholes with a marker

who are you, the fucking art police? smash art-nazism!


art–noun 1.the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. 2.the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria; works of art collectively, as paintings, sculptures, or drawings: a museum of art; an art collection. 3.a field, genre, or category of art: Dance is an art. 4.the fine arts collectively, often excluding architecture: art and architecture. 5.any field using the skills or techniques of art: advertising art; industrial art. 6.(in printed matter) illustrative or decorative material: Is there any art with the copy for this story? 7.the principles or methods governing any craft or branch of learning: the art of baking; the art of selling. 8.the craft or trade using these principles or methods. 9.skill in conducting any human activity: a master at the art of conversation. 10.a branch of learning or university study, esp. one of the fine arts or the humanities, as music, philosophy, or literature. 11.arts, a.(used with a singular verb
) the humanities: a college of arts and sciences. b.(used with a plural verb
) liberal arts. 12.skilled workmanship, execution, or agency, as distinguished from nature. 13.trickery; cunning: glib and devious art. 14.studied action; artificiality in behavior. 15.an artifice or artful device: the innumerable arts and wiles of politics. 16.Archaic. science, learning, or scholarship.

"Definitions of art attempt to make sense of two different sorts of facts: art has important historically contingent cultural features, and it also, arguably, has trans-historical, trans-cultural characteristics that point in the direction of a relatively stable aesthetic core. (Theorists who regard art as an invention of eighteenth-century Europe will, of course, regard this way of putting the matter as tendentious, on the grounds that entities produced outside that culturally distinctive institution do not fall under the extension of “art” and hence are irrelevant to the art-defining project. (Shiner 2001) Whether the concept of art is precise enough to justify this much confidence about what falls under its extension claim is unclear.) Conventionalist definitions take art's cultural features to be explanatorily fundamental, and attempt to capture the phenomena —revolutionary modern art, the traditional close connection of art with the aesthetic, the possibility of autonomous art traditions, etc. — in social/historical terms. Non-conventionalist or “functionalist” definitions reverse this explanatory order, taking a concept like the aesthetic (or some allied concept like the formal, or the expressive) as basic, and aim to account for the phenomena by working that concept harder, perhaps extending it to non-perceptual properties."

The groundwork for institutional definitions was laid by Arthur Danto, better known to non-philosophers as the long-time influential art critic for the Nation. Danto coined the term “artworld”, by which he meant “an atmosphere of art theory.” Danto's definition has been glossed as follows: something is a work of art if and only if (i) it has a subject (ii) about which it projects some attitude or point of view (has a style) (iii) by means of rhetorical ellipsis (usually metaphorical) which ellipsis engages audience participation in filling in what is missing, and (v) where the work in question and the interpretations thereof require an art historical context. (Danto, Carroll) Clause (v) is what makes the definition institutionalist. The view has been criticized for entailing that art criticism written in a highly rhetorical style is art, lacking but requiring an independent account of what makes a context art historical, and for not applying to music."