Oslo has a serious graffiti problem. It’s more or less everywhere you walk and it’s ugly as hell. I wouldn’t call myself a globetrotter, but I’ve been around the block and from what I can remember I have never seen as much graffiti anywhere in the world as I see in Oslo. The same goes for drug addicts and drunks, but that’s another story. It’s so bad a brilliant Norwegian musician wrote a song about it, here accompanied by a video that sort of proves my point:

If you are a running around doing this you need to get your act together. I’d love to see you arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to community service; your first job being to remove whatever piece of crap (pun intended) you were caught making. You might say that I’m overreacting. I say you should read up on the broken windows theory and shut the fuck up. The kind of graffiti Oslo is drowning in makes no sense at all. Today I even saw a wall where someone had written #antisec, which made me want to reach out for the first nerdy looking “hacker” activist I saw and punch him in the face. That’s the broken windows theory in practice.

But every now and then a piece of art surfaces that doesn’t just look like a random act of vandalism. It blends into the urban environment where it’s been created while at the same time livening up what is normally a gray and boring area. Some time over the last couple of weeks, two artists have created some excellent pieces down by the walkway opposite the bus terminal in Schweigaards gate. They’ve even covered some of the crap that was already on the walls. Here are a few quick captures I did while walking by today.

Yeah, I know I’m being quite the hypocrite here; smashing common graffiti while at the same time praising the works of art pictured above. But I’m going to go ahead and let this one slide and just be a hypocrite. Digging around on the interwebs a little, I discovered that artists are Alice Pasquini and C215. It looks like they tend to roam around a lot. Check out Street Art London for pictures of work they’ve done in London. Also, have a look at C215’s Flickr photo stream for more pieces he’s done in Oslo this summer.