It seems like it was only yesterday that a graffiti heart over the freshly painted A Sunday Afternoon an Dolores Park sent the entire Mission community into a tailspin of despair and outrage.  And rightly so: a bang-up mural celebrating everyone's favorite park was defaced.  But it wasn't just that the specific mural was blemished, rather it was that a mural was damaged.

Now it seems like the norm is for SF murals get covered over with tags and pieces.  Eine's series of alphabet murals along Mission Street were defaced within days by the same crew pictured above.  A quick walk down Bartlett, Market, Divis, or one of the various other mural alleys around the Mission show the same thing.  It almost seems antithetical to the core of what street art and graffiti represents: putting art out there, for free, for everyone to see and admire on their own accord.  In a sense, there's now a crew of kids acting as a gallery owners, determining which murals the world gets to check out and which should be reused as a new canvass.

It's a bummer, really.

On Clarion Alley.

[Pic and title by Hood Rat Stuff]