I first noticed these icons on various streets, lying like flattened pedestrians, slowly being absorbed into the asphalt.

Koho School of Sumi-E interior. Shot from the outside by a neighbor turned voyeur: A stool someone sat on. A floor someone painted to suggest a carpet. An old desk. 

Walking home, noting various stickers on various utility poles, boxes, and random surfaces, I saw this today  (August 7, 2009) at the base of a blue box, at the intersection of Sullivan and Prince Street.  It looked to me like a work by Kara Walker, but I was surprised that an artist of her reputation was experimenting with public sphere wheatpaste posters.

It's a lovely thing to turn the corner and see this beat up sign and better yet, see the old counter open and countermen prepared to make you a sandwich and pour you a cup of coffee. Every day Eldridge Street changes, a brick falls and brick face rises, and one day soon the sign will be gone, too, but for now it is there and I recommend a visit to this very curious corner of the City

Implausible. But there it is behind an tenement on a suddenly fashionable street. They were quite rare and once thought extinct, until rediscovered in, I think, Southeast China, during the Second World War.

All our work subject to decay the moment it is approved. The best of of our work might be seen once before it passes into oblivion. It might be savored, or ridiculed. It is, however, of necessity, narrow, parochial, even bigoted. Too often it's self important, often a lie. (And a bad lie.) The death of the work, which is to say, its relevance, is the only truth about it. The above being true, let us create everything with its death in mind.