There are a lot of us who care about downtown and who work in our own myriad ways to make it better. Terry and Kelly, their kids and all the employees at the Cherry St. Cafe and Espresso Parts work really hard on making downtown an attractive space to build community. Half the people I know from OlyBlog get coffee there at least a couple times a week. Several of us used Terry's conference room (he wasn't even in town, for goodness sake!) last Friday for the very hopeful beginning of some serious coalition building for downtown vitality. And the work he has done in his alley (and now the really cool coffee-concrete planter in conjunction with Meta) is what really started off all the alley improvement projects on the City's end over the last year. 

I wish the ever-increasing list of worthwhile expenditures the Espresso Parts folks have tallied up in the name of improving downtown was enough to inoculate them from stupid people.  I wish that really cool murals that downtown businesses pay for to make their street look more hospitable were immune from tacky taggers.  And I wish that people who think tagging is an acceptable form of public discourse would start setting the bar higher than tagging someone else's work. 

I particularly like the classic steam engine locomotive look that this perspective provides. And had my photos from Friday not turned out not-so-hot this would already be in the Olympia Public Art section of OlyBlog.

That being said I can only speculate on the motive and my speculation is that of a graffiti outsider fascinated by its history, word play, process and aesthetic. So here's my speculation: Cond tagged it because she/he was giving respect to the mural/piece and to let other like minded folks know it. I may be completely wrong but I imagine that had the tagger been intending disrespect she/he would have gone over the artist's name.

"In principle, I am an anarchist. Kurt Vonnegut once said he was an agnostic who respects Jesus Christ. I am an anarchist who loves democracy." - Kenzaburo Oe

I also think enpen is right about the motivations for this tag. There is a certain language spoken, so to speak, in graf culture through their work. From graffitila.com:

"Tagging over a piece is a common form of dissing (disrespecting) either a specific writer in a crew or an entire crew. But often, tag toys simply disrespect whoever happens to be up on a wall. Although tagging on pieces is often deliberate disrespect, sometimes one can see a respectful tag, that is, one that is done neatly between the lines, usually near an outer edge, as if to say “I really want to be part of this piece but not mess it up.”

I kind of wish folks wouldn't target things like murals too, being that they're outside of graffiti culture, but like enpen said (basically), there's really not anything anybody can do when somebody decides to. Perhaps this is another thing that comes with living in the city, like blocked views.

you might enjoy this article about a New York street art vandal.

But I am Just Another Voice