It is defacing property. Period. I look at it no differently than someone spray painting a neighbor's garage with their disgusting doodles.
It isn't beautiful. It isn't art.
It is VANDALISM.
In the town I grew up in, there is a rock on a state road that ran between two towns. People began painting this rock back in the twenties, and the rock is very flat, is about 10 feet high, 15 feet wide, and comes to a point. It is very nearly right on the border between the towns, it faces the northbound lanes from the southbound side of the road, and is situated right after a causeway between two lakes. There is a big turnround area, perhaps 30 yards or so. There is very rare foot traffic, there are no houses or buildings nearby, pretty much, you only see it as you drive by. The rock is halfway up a small hill, and the earth all around it, in the front, up the sides, and around the back has been eroded by a century of human foot traffic. I was drunk once, and nearly fell off the top while hanging over it in an attempt to paint high up. That was as a teenager. As I got older, we brought ladders with us...:)
Everyone, from towns all around, refers to it as "The Rock". And everyone knows what it refers to.
The paint is layered at least half a foot thick, and recently, it delaminated, and a large section of that paint fell off.
It is painted for the high school football rivalry between the towns, birthdays, weddings, deaths, championships, you name it. And people have been painting it for nearly a century. My mother and father both knew of people painting it when they were little kids. I have personally painted it between 20 and 30 times, most recently, just a few years ago with a large group of people when this woman we all knew passed on:
We painted it white, let it dry, took a bunch of drywall screws and created a grid with string to transfer the image from a photo to a rock. Those drywall screws went right into that paint! I wasn't good enough artistically to transfer the photo freehand. We then used a magic marker to lay out the general outline from the photo. It didn't come out perfect, but it was our tribute to someone we respected. This is how it came out:
Point is, this is the kind of thing you see on this rock. In all the years I did it, we would paint it with as few as one or two people, or have crowds of twenty to thirty particpating and hobnobbing. While we did it, even as teenagers, the cops would occasionally pull in and watch, but they never chased anyone off that I can remember.
Very rarely would there be foul language painted there, which was pretty remarkable considering all the age groups. Occasionally, there would be absolutely beautiful artwork that someone took time to put up there.
And any message up there rarely lasts more than a week, even in the dead of winter. It gets painted over so often, that is is hard not to just understand it, although as a teenager, I got into a fight with a bunch of big city guys who had painted the rock a day or two before, and didn't want us to paint over it. So we had a fight, and we rolled down that hill from the base, clutching and swinging as we tumbled.
Years ago, before I went into the Navy, on my eighteenth birthday (a month before I went in) they had a big surprise party for me, and one of the gifts was a rock, with that same general shape and flat face, about 8 inches across and six inches high, a small jar of Testors green paint, a jar of white paint, and a paint brush...:)
I was bored one day, and painted that piece of rock up to resemble one of my better known paint jobs that stayed up for a little while...I still have that rock today, using it as a book end...
What I have seen up there, for the fifty years I was aware of it, was not vandalism. It wasn't ugly. It was constantly painted by a community of people who understood that it was a open canvas billboard for people of all ages to paint whatever and whenever they wanted to. And people rarely abused it by putting crap on it like we see everywhere now.
Graffiti, like what is commonly seen now makes me angry. It is malicious, dirty, and unsightly, especially in populated areas.