YOU BUY OR RENT A HOUSE in a suburb of Sydney’s inner west, and you move to a vibrant, diverse, community, with a sense of a common aesthetic. You recycle your plastics, and compost your kitchen scraps. Your children go to public schools—the good ones, mind, not the ones with disciplinary problems—and on the weekends they hang around the local cafes, independent cinemas and parks, not large commercialised shopping centres. You disapprove of mandatory detention of refugees, Australian participation in American wars in the Middle East, and the old Part 3A of the Planning Act. You look down on the Western suburbs where it’s all McMansions and four wheel drives, the North Shore where there’s no vitality, and the Shire most of all where they spend their public holidays organising race riot barbecues. You vote Labor in the lower house, Green in the upper, and if you vote Liberal, you have the good taste to keep your mouth shut about it. Everyone’s happy!

Then, you make the mistake of painting your wall in a Federation beige in accordance with the Council’s notes about the surrounding heritage environment. Did you submit your application to paint over that derivative bit of graffiti piece of important public art with the local insufferable hipsters community of street artists? Apparently not.

Slogan: THIS WALL USED TO HAVE ART ON IT, NOW IT HAS COCKS. Mallett St, Camperdown, Sydney.

As Lenin might have said of the infantile disorder of anarchism, scratch a public artist, find a parochial art snob who likes drawing cock.

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