Translated material
Hunt for graffiti artists: the season is open
Deputy Head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Moscow Vyacheslav Kozlov announced the start of the special operation “Graffist”, within the framework of which Moscow police will catch street artists, register them, as well as identify their gathering places and draw up blacklists. The reason for the operation was an incident in the Moscow region on January 26, when about 70 graffiti artists stopped the Lesnoy Gorodok - Kievskaya train and painted it all over in a matter of minutes . Russian Railways complain that the annual damage from damaged cars amounts to tens of millions of rubles. Soon after the incident in the Moscow region, railway workers announced a reward of 100 thousand rubles for help in finding the vandals, but the perpetrators of the incident have not yet been found.
PublicPost asked street artists if they consider train bombing to be vandalism and what they think about new threats from authorities:
Pasha 183:
“Let’s start with the fact that initially the graffiti movement was based precisely on “train bombing”. These guys can have three motives. Firstly, ideological - in this way they fight the system, cause some kind of monetary damage to the authorities. Secondly , this may be an imitation of the West. And the third motive is psychological. Nowadays, few people work with young people, teenagers are left to themselves, they do not express themselves in any way and use these methods to declare their existence, that they exist and are doing something.
I truly feel sorry for you guys. It’s the fault of those who don’t deal with these teenagers—so they found this form of creativity. If they had also written some poetry on this train, some thought that could be conveyed to everyone, then even after their arrest many would have come to their defense.
This movement is spontaneous, and any tightening of legislative policy is unlikely to have an effect. It seems to me that, on the contrary, this will aggravate everything and enrage them. This will also greatly increase the number of simple graffiti. In France, it’s hard to draw on the streets, there is a surveillance system installed everywhere - alarms and cameras - and there people are forced to draw some very simple things. They just don’t have time to draw something serious. They write tags.
By the way, I know people who prepare money for a fine in advance. They literally save for years in order to pay a fine if something happens - and then go quietly and draw for themselves. It's like football fans - they all chip in together so they can take it and get away with it.
Dima Rasko:
“This is not the first time something like this has happened, and then journalists suddenly inflated such news. Russian Railways have been laundering bags of money for years on the supposedly high cost of painting cars (although in fact it costs them a couple of thousand rubles). And now they are forced to offer a mythical reward for the capture of vandals and pretend that such daring painting has never happened before. The country already has something to do besides catching vandals. And the police now have to watch graffiti videos and compile fake reports - they don’t even have time to carry out their current ones. duties of eating donuts. They understand perfectly well that they will not be able to prove anything, so under the influence of the press, a plan is being developed to close the case by blaming dummies for everything.”
Konstantin Sindik:
"Train painting is a common phenomenon in graffiti culture around the world, an integral part of it. How do I feel about the fact that this train was painted? Or about the fact that the artists were raided? Then the answer is - how do you feel about huge advertising banners in the city, which sometimes carry information that is useless to people and, in addition, spoil the appearance of the city? But they hang, and no one organizes a raid, since everything is authorized by the council and paid for. But, naturally, no one asked the city residents for their opinion. The same with the train painting - if illegal artists had paid for this “advertising space”, no one would have raided them.”
CRG:
“There were no questions to me or my friends about this. Those who did legal graffiti will continue to do so, and those who “bombed” will continue to “bomb.” This doesn’t scare the guys at all. only fifth-graders, since those who are in the know understand perfectly well that a “duck” was broadcast on TV - a report compiled from various videos from the Internet. It tells how several people “kill” a certain number of carriages in a few minutes - alas, this is. purely physically impossible."
Misha Most:
“So far, there haven’t been any raids or executions. Some guys were caught painting trains at night, but maybe it was just a coincidence... But it got into the news and there’s already a resonance. In general, it’s normal that someone gets caught. It would be It would be strange if they didn’t catch it. By the way, this is not the first time this has happened - entire trains have been painted before. They just decided to take it up and promote it in the media - maybe there was a record amount of damage, maybe something else...
I do not agree with those who consider all this to be window dressing TV hype. It’s too early to say so, and we shouldn’t underestimate our police: if they want to catch them, they’ll catch you in no time, and the combination of “Internet plus show-offs” provides fertile ground for this. I’m more worried about the fact that in the event of arrests, our inexperienced youth will begin to rat out everyone around them, including their grandmother, out of fear.”
Photo: Reuters
Zuk Club:
“I believe that damage to city or private property should be criminally punishable. In this regard, I am absolutely on the side of the authorities. From the point of view of artists, I can say that everyone should understand the degree of risk and be aware of what they are doing. But I’m sure that with the advent of such operations there will not be fewer graffiti artists.”
Andrey FAV:
“In this whole story, one thing is interesting to me: why did they come to their senses right now? After all, similar graffiti actions have already taken place, and videos of them are easily available on the Internet. Probably, for someone this was a discovery, and he grabbed his head. The police were hired, so that they find and punish at least some villains. The idea of the operation in the form in which it is written about it seems to me to be fruitless. Let’s see what happens in the end.”
Photo: Reuters
Last year, Sergei Sobyanin took the initiative to involve street artists in work to improve the appearance of the city. The mayor said he wanted to use street art to decorate the facades of abandoned buildings and the walls of underground passages. According to him, graffiti artists will help make urban space “cleaner, brighter and more beautiful.” |