Massive GTA 6 Mural Tagged By Graffiti Artist Overnight And People Aren’t Happy: ‘As A Graffiti Artist Myself, I Honestly Think This Is Pretty Disrespectful’

Earlier this week, a graffiti artist tagged a large Grand Theft Auto 6 mural located in New York City. Reactions to the tag have been mostly negative, with many fans claiming the artist has ruined the mural. Back in early October, Rockstar Games hired some artists to paint a GTA 6 mural in Brooklyn. The artwork is massive and features both Jason and Lucia. It took about a week to create the mural, and fans tracked its progress and celebrated its completion. For a lot of GTA fans, this mural represented a big step in Rockstar’s marketing push for GTA 6. So a lot of them aren’t taking the news well that a graffiti artist named Jelous has tagged the spot and documented it online. Sometime late Tuesday night, Jelous quietly and sneakily sprayed a basic black-and-white logo featuring his name onto the bottom half of the large GTA 6 mural in NYC. The artist then posted their tag on Instagram, where it has quickly become one of their most popular posts. Many of the comments are, as you’d expect, upset about the tagging of the mural. “Ruined,” said one Instagram user. “Not cool,” replied another. There were also people defending Jelous, arguing that this is just a big advertisement and is fair game for a tag. Over on Reddit, the news has been received even more poorly by GTA fans, with some calling it vandalism and others suggesting that if you’re going to tag over cool artwork, you should at least add something more exciting and not as basic. One person claiming to be a graffiti artist from Italy offered their 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 some unwritten rules and a certain level of respect that should come with it. Going over someone else’s work is one thing, especially if you’re putting something of your own out there that actually shows skill or makes a statement. But just throwing random tags over a huge, hand-painted mural feels like a cheap move to me. I get that the GTA VI mural is basically a commercial advertisement and not necessarily a piece by a graffiti writer, but someone still put time, effort, and skill into painting it. That should count for something. Graffiti is about expression, but it’s also about respect. Just because something is commercial doesn’t mean it’s automatically fair game to destroy. At least that’s how I see it.” On the other hand, tagging a big corporate-funded mural is a pretty GTA-like move. Whatever the case, a lot more people are now aware of Jelous, which was the whole point of tagging the GTA 6 mural in the first place.