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I see stenciled graffiti like this all over the place. Sometimes they’re on buildings but most often I see them somewhere semi-permanent: a sidewalk, plywood cordoning off construction areas, or—like this one—on the thick layers of flaking paint the base of a lamp post. It won’t wash away with rain or a well-aimed garden hose but it’s not for the ages either. It’s for now.

There’s an artist who puts koi not-ponds on sidewalks and the perfect curves of the fish are so convincing that you can almost see them move. Right now, there are a bunch of comic, generic-piratey-ships, sometimes afloat, sometimes sinking, sometimes getting pulled under by a tentacled sea monster in different colors on sidewalks. I used to walk by a stencil of that iconic image of Billie Holiday, you know the one, almost every day. It never failed to make me smile. It’s gone now, faded away.

Some of them are single-color. Some of them are more elaborate. But even the most ornate ones are temporary. It can take months or a year for one to be walked and rained and scuffed away or it could be painted or papered over almost as soon as it’s applied. Technically, I guess they’re vandalism. They’re not murals. They’re not public art. But they’re public. And they’re art. And I enjoy them. Now.