Britto Mural in Wynwood Gets Predictably, Vapidly Tagged

Britto haters have struck again. And they’re still, well, kind of lame.

Someone blasted a Britto mural in Wynwood with white paint over the weekend. Scrawled in squiggly letters across the black background spotted with flowers in Britto’s characteristically colorful patterns are the words “C DOG,” which we’re assuming is the name of the tagger.

How very clever.

Cultist hasn’t been a fan of Britto’s work for some time; his Dadeland sculpture made our list of Miami’s ugliest public art, and we couldn’t even come up with 10 convincing reasons to not hate him.

But this reaction to his mural, recently painted on the outer walls of Britto’s long-standing workspace in Wynwood, is more juvenile than, well, your typical Britto painting. If you’re going to dispute whether an artist’s work is actually “art,” you’d better be artistic about it. It helps if you can come across like a person who has respectable opinions about what art should and should not be.

The simple act of writing your name on a wall — or, we don’t know, just throwing buckets of paint at a wall like “C DOG” appears to have done here — does not meet those criteria. Neither does writing “Not Art” or “error” on a statue. Reactions like these are the Miami art scene equivalent of this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, during which MIA hoisted her middle finger at the audience. Any statement she may have been trying to make was overshadowed by the crudeness of the gesture.

And that’s sad, in this case, because the statement — Britto sucks — is something we can (and frequently do) get behind. Just not if you’ve gotta make Miami an uglier place in order to say it.

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