The Lost Cat Art of Ithaca, NY | Hacker News Reader

The Lost Cat Art of Ithaca, NY

lostcatithaca.com

42 pointsjdsleppy17 comments

This is super neat but I think understates the absolute scale of this set of graffiti. I live in Ithaca and it is just everywhere.

My favorite is the one near Sweet Melissa's (here called Large Fence Cat: https://www.lostcatithaca.com/cats/10/large-fence-cat/ )

I'm also here; I've even seen it on cars.

Fellow Ithacan here!

Spent 2 years at Ithaca College. Some of my fondest memories are of hiking and exploring the gorges.

Not from there exactly, but it is gorges, as they say.

And me…

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.

[1] https://www.thelocal.at/20160217/vienna-gallery-shows-convic...

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)

lol typical Cornell alumni response. We don't mention school name... instead, we'll say, "I went to school upstate".

I guess it dates back a few years.

https://ithacavoice.com/2017/11/introducing-ithaquestions-lo...

Visually, they're clearly done by several different people. Some related, some probably not, as a copycat.

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

Thanks. Do you know how it started?

No idea! It was here when I moved (2018)

I remember seeing them as far back as 2012

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

Never change, Ithaca!

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.

i love it. this is brilliant.

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