Everywhere you look, they’re there. Shh. You know who I’m talking about. They’re in the alleyways, they’re on the garage doors. Maybe every garage door at this point. Turn your head for just one moment, let your guard down even a little, and whoosh. A mural of a heavily sedated owl wearing a top hat has appeared, and all you felt was the temperature drop, the static on your skin.
The Public Artist has been here.
At first, you tell yourself the figures are harmless. A painting of a goofy little guy, some kind of gnome, maybe a vaguely cross-eyed squirrel. It’s kind of cute? But not really your style. That’s okay, not everything is for you. But the more you see them, the more you wish you could also see some other types of art.
At least it’s just one neighborhood, you think. Or wait. No. You cross the city, there it is again: this time in the form of a heavy-browed sasquatch holding a coffee cup. They’re cropping up faster and faster these days. You hear rumors that there are plans for even more. A thousand new ones, they say. You keep your head down, knowing your peaceful neighborhood walk could, at any moment, be interrupted by an octopus holding a hamburger.
Behind closed doors, your poet friend calls the aesthetic “nautical-java-burner core” (I told you she was a poet). You start to think of it as a whimsy blight. The exterior world smiling back at you with the fixed gaze of a raccoon that’s one bong rip away from pulling out a ukulele at a party, unprompted. “It’s fine, everything’s fine.”
But it’s not fine. Something is starting to feel unsettling about the ubiquity. This can’t be right. We’re smarter than this. Edgy, even. A city that repeatedly chooses the same frictionless aesthetic is revealing something about its own appetite for risk. It is choosing comfort over experiment, legibility over complexity, and familiarity over the possibility of being altered by an encounter with art. This isn’t who we are. Or is it? You can’t remember.
After a while, you stop being surprised. That’s the scariest part. You can’t remember the first one you saw. The murals feel older than the city itself, like they arrived in a batch before you did, an advance party softening the terrain. There is no moment of encounter anymore, only a low-resolution background hum of familiarity. The figures are not on the city, they’ve seeped into it. The soft tyranny of the familiar.
They must be stopped, you think. We’re just confusing repetition with importance! You subtly ask around. A barista, a server, a first date; you’re met with pleasantly blank replies. “They’re just part of the city. It’s not about liking or disliking. They’ve always been here.”
Some say that art should make you feel something. That even if you feel anger or disgust, then it’s done its job. But they’re right, it’s not about liking or disliking, you’re anhedonic. And worried. It’s unsettling that you did, in fact, maybe just prefer the side of the hospital better when it was greige, and blank. We need blank spaces, you begin to think. Just a few. We’ll suffocate without them.
You notice how the work never changes. You realize you are not witnessing an artist grow; you are watching a symbol reproduce. These aren’t murals—they’re sigils. They intend to replicate until every surface has been covered.
Other artists quietly disappear. Who can compete with someone who will cover your building for free? Someone so determined in their spraypaint manifest destiny? The city’s Faustian bargain for getting to boast of being “covered in art.”
One night, you walk home a different way, thinking you’ve outsmarted them. New block, new alley, a blank stretch of concrete. For a moment, the wall is just a wall.
Then you see it: a fresh outline, the first curve of a too-familiar heavy-lidded eye.
They’re here.
This is their city.
You were only ever walking through it.
People kept talking about this piece, originally published in our 2025 Complaints Issue, so we made it easier to find. You can find the rest of our complaints here.
