Huge GTA 6 Mural Tagged By Graffiti Artist Overnight and People Aren’t Happy: ‘As a graffiti artist myself, I honestly think it’s pretty disrespectful’

Earlier this week, a graffiti artist tagged a large Grand Theft Auto 6 mural located in New York. Reactions to the tag were mostly negative, with many fans claiming the artist ruined the mural.

In early October, Rockstar Games hired artists to paint a GTA6 mural in Brooklyn. The artwork is massive and features both Jason and Lucia. It took about a week to create the mural, and fans followed its progress and celebrated its completion. For many RGT fans, this mural represented an important step in Rockstar’s marketing campaign for GTA6. So many of them are not taking well to the news that a graffiti artist named Jelous has tagged the place and documented it online.

Late Tuesday night, Jelous quietly and sneakily spray-painted a basic black and white logo featuring his name on the bottom half of the large GTA6 mural in New York. The artist then posted his tag to Instagram, where it quickly became one of his most popular posts. As you might expect, many comments are upset by the marking of the mural. “Ruined,” said one Instagram user. “Not cool,” replied another. There were also people defending Jelous, arguing that it was just a big advertisement and that it was fair game for a tag.

On Reddit, the news was even more poorly received by RGT fans, with some calling it vandalism and others suggesting that if you’re going to mark up cool artwork, you should at least add something more exciting and less basic. A person claiming to be an Italian graffiti artist offered his own take on the situation.

“As an Italian graffiti artist myself, I honestly think this is pretty disrespectful, even by graffiti standards,” said user venzoffthewall.

“I’m part of the culture, so I understand how things work, but there are still unwritten rules and a certain level of respect that should come with that. Reviewing someone else’s work is one thing, especially if you’re putting up something of your own that really shows a talent or makes a statement. But just throwing random labels on a huge hand-painted mural seems like a cheap decision to me. I understand that the GTA VI The mural is essentially a commercial advertisement and not necessarily the work of a graffiti artist, but someone still put in the time, effort and skill to paint it. That should count for something. Graffiti is about expression, but also about respect. Just because something is commercial doesn’t mean it’s automatically fair to destroy it. At least, that’s how I see it.

On the other hand, tagging a large corporate-funded mural is a nice RGT-like a movement. Anyway, a lot more people know about Jelous now, which is why he was tagged in Jelous. GTA6 wall in the first place.