VANDALIST TOURISM: Some Europeans apparently enjoy visiting the Big Apple in order to deface it:

“Europeans do love to come to NYC and try to get up on a train. Most New York writers don’t, because they know how quickly the trains will get buffed.”

A few years ago, a Daily News report found that 70% of elaborate subway car graffiti is created by Europeans. And at the end of 2011, a 25-year-old French graffiti artist named Maxime Bezat was charged for tagging subway cars and stations in both NYC and Boston.

While Dobkin appreciates their moxie, he has some criticism for their form: “I find it kind of weird that we exported this art form to Europe, and it comes all the way back to write on our trains looking exactly the same. Why can’t Germans come up with their own style of vandalism?”

To be fair, I think you could make the case that a fair amount of the impetus that causes graffiti in the first place was imported into the US by German immigrants from the Frankfurt School, which worked very hard starting in the late 1930s to invert American morals.

Note that this article is from 2011 (I found it last night in the comments section of James Lileks’ latest Bleat); there’s less of a shortage of graffiti and vandalism in Bill de Blasio’s New York than there was in Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg’s era, which should please a subset of both its visitors and its residents.

Such as these chaps: Graffiti Artists Sue Real Estate Developer for Whitewashing Their Murals.

Related: “Why Liberals Identify with Criminals,” as recently explored by Tom Trinko at the American Thinker.