^[1]I had to look twice just to make sure the effect wasn’t intended by the original artist.

Yup. Some vandal has definitely tagged the country-style spirit bear at the corner of Smythe and Burrard outside the Paramount Theatre.

Graffiti has been part of the urban scene since before Rome’s most famous citizen scrawled “Julius wuz here” on beachfront property in England. It will always be with us.

Actually, some of it, I don’t mind; on back alleys, overpasses and underneath bridges, people with too much time on their hands can go ahead and stake out as much turf as they like. Some of the art is even appealing.

I don’t even like this particular spirit bear all that much (It just looks, well… stupid). But it hardly seems fair for one self-styled underground artist to deface the artistic creation of another.

Isn’t there some kind of graffiti artist constitution that makes it beyond the pale to actually tag an existing piece of public art? To me, this kind of graffiti isn’t cool or counter-cultural. It’s just plain anti-social, in the most extreme definition of the term.

By the way, does anyone have a favorite piece of public art they’d like to mention? Mine is the War of the Worlds tripod things by English Bay beach.