We had something similar here in Vienna, Austria. A person sprayed the name PUBER all over the city [1]. The person was eventually caught, and given a 10-month prison sentence, given the total damage caused.
You can see the name all over the city now. It's everywhere. It's so common that I assume that most occurrences now stem from copycats.
I went to university here, but lost cat did not exist at the time. What is this about? Can anyone provide background? (The Website does not, as far as I can tell)
I go there now - It's a set of graffiti images that resemble a stick-figure cat with sometimes square features. They're usually on the back side of signs and things like that. There's quite a bit of it throughout Ithaca now
My favorite Ithaca moment was a t-shirt in a t-shirt store there that made fun of a New York State lottery ad campaign about what people would do with their lottery money that stated "I would buy a mountain of crack and live in a whorehouse." - Joe Blow
I think it's a little weird to go to the effort of cataloging a low-effort serial graffiti like this, but I suppose the frivolousness is part of the fun.
It shows that people unconsciously accept graffiti, even when it is a simple tag. Rejection stems from not being able to read and understand the writing.
Then again, one could argue that this is not graffiti in the modern sense, but simply traditional street art. I suppose it comes down to whether the artist considers ”lost cat” to be a mark of their cultural identity.
My favorite is the one near Sweet Melissa's (here called Large Fence Cat: https://www.lostcatithaca.com/cats/10/large-fence-cat/ )