Thinking Aloud wrote:hadespussercats wrote:mistermack wrote:The trouble with graffiti there is that it's such a beautiful spot. Any manmade art is going to look shit in comparison.
And sure enough it does.
Put it somewhere even more ugly than the art. But in this case, it would take a lot of searching.
Knowing the Irish, someone will go there with some power kit and obliterate it. Hopefully. I might do it myself.
I'm going near there tomorrow, but it's too cold to bother, this time of year.
I'm not giving a general endorsement here of defacing natural wonders. But someone went to a lot of effort for this one, and I think it's pretty.
Effort, danger and difficulty getting there is absolutely no excuse for defacing areas of natural beauty. Once you set a precedent, it becomes a free-for-all, and suddenly the natural beauty of all the bits of rock face that we can get to ourselves is lost. You can't clean a sedimentary rock-face without taking off the weathered surface layer to reveal the clean rock underneath, which would be as much of a scar as the paint, and for years. The paint kills the lichens and other things that take decades to grow.
So they'll need to post some guards to keep people off.
It could have been a lot worse. Some hateful bastard painted a swastika on Plymouth Rock. And he didn't even get it right-- painted the mirror image of one.
I realize there's an argument to be made that that at least raises questions/confronts identity, etc., and thus might have a higher claim to the title of art than the graffiti at Moher. I don't see it that way. All I'm saying is I think this particular tag is pretty. And considering it's supposedly very difficult to impossible to remove, that's a lucky break.
And to Mr. Huxley-- I never claimed it added value to the cliffs. But I do have to side with Ani that there's no real difference between this and the paintings at Lascaux, or the pictographs in canyons in the American Southwest, other than age.
