In case you haven’t yet seen it, the wall at Central Parkway and Vine St. on the edge of Over-the-Rhine [the side of Park+Vine] got bombed over the weekend. Although I’m a fan of graffiti and, more generally, street art, I don’t condone this. The wall was being prepped for a mural that ArtWorks is creating this summer and, obviously, I’ve really been looking forward to witnessing the development of the mural.
Department of Everyday Visualingual 
That’s a shame.
I took a picture too. Stuff like that just pisses me off.
It’s amazing that someone could get away with producing ALL of that graffiti without getting caught. WOW.
Can’t wait to see the Artworks mural!
wow, i saw it this morning and thought wow, they made a lot of progress over the weekend.
They’ve been respectful of the other locations, so hopefully they were just getting this out of their system before the real work started.
It’s hella lame but not the end of the world. I’m sure the ArtWorks team will keep going and, as long as these writers don’t strike again, it shouldn’t matter much in the long run. Still, it’s troubling that art-in-progress wasn’t off-limits for these people.
If a scaffold is left standing next to the side of a building, unguarded, unattended, at night, and the building’s just been prepped to paint on, it’s almost a gimme that you’re going to get some graffiti up there. I would be more surprised if all those conditions were true and NO graffiti artists had stopped to leave their mark. Good thing it looks like ArtWorks has plenty of gray primer to cover over it and start anew.
I agree with CompleteLackOfSurprise…clean wall + scaffolding = invitation for graffiti. I just saw the wall today and it is too bad, but it got me thinking: ArtWorks sometimes comes off as too exclusive with their lengthy application processes and painters who are forced to essentially paint-by-number to the wishes of the artist. Why can graffiti culture not exist in today’s OTR? Just down the road (Central Pkwy & Liberty), Elementz hosts graffiti classes! Does OTR = urban America, or a conservative suburbanites perspective of the city? ArtWorks should celebrate and build off of this case of ad hoc graffiti. Or at least acknowledge other more relevant and collaborative methods for creating public art in OTR.
There were gang tags on the first and third scaffolding levels. It’s not as ad hoc as you might think. They were covered with paint or Kilzit two or three days ago.
Graffiti culture is dysfunctional culture because it presumes to force property owners to become de facto collaborators in the creative process.