They should have shot them and left their smoking corpses burning so everyone could see.

@1 perhaps that's a bit harsh...a simple caning would do.

The best way to deal with graffiti would be for private citizens to blatantly take pictures of "artists" in action. When they inevitably attack you could kill them. A citizen with a CWP could and should kill them. This actually happened unintentionally in LA.

how about a photo of this incredible work?

STAY UP!

here is a link to an article with a pic, including a police cruiser for scale... MASSIVE :

http://www.canyon-news.com/artman2/publi…

Speaking of street art-ish things, this baby, maybe 15 feet tall, went up on the building at the corner of Pine and Bellevue Ave about a week ago. It only lasted a day or two before it was removed, which made me sad. However, I can't read what it says, so maybe it was inciting violence or advertising scientology.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/osmunda_cin…

@ #6, ur link is not working

God forbid anyone should paint graffiti on the glorious masterpiece that is the Los Angeles River culvert.

I'm not seeing "damage" here, and certainly not to the transit authority.

@2 good point.

I guess whips and chains with a few broken legs would suffice.

I'm willing to admit that this kind of graffiti is art, as long as you'll agree with me that removing it is also art. It's almost a kind of -- what's the term? -- anti-art? No?

The creation and destruction of graffiti is a dialog between two poles of the social matrix, representing a dialectic of order and disorder. The work itself is not just art -- the act of making graffiti is performance art. And by the same token, the act of incarcerating graffiti artists is also performance art.

One of the ways that the act of creating graffiti gains its emotional impact is the necessary unwillingness of the owners of part of the medium -- the wall or whatever -- to participate in the creation of the art. Without the illicit appropriation of the medium, it wouldn't mean what it means.

Similarly, the unwillingness of the artist to be confined in a cell is intrinsic in the power of the statement made in the performance of the imprisonment art. The legality of the proceedings and the resistance of the "victim" (for who is the real victim, the viewer must ask?) in the performance makes it mean what it means.

@1: No, that's what you do with Blackwater employees.

If I lived in LA, I'd cover the whole concrete depressive ugliness of it in Dayglo.

Why is the US Army Corps of Engineers spending 1.3 million to clean up a concrete wall that no one cares about? Isn't the Corps of Engineers who are helping to clean up the gulf and other disasters? That 1.3 million could be used for far more important causes.