Some of my time this summer was spent “vandalizing.” A friend and I chalked a few reproductions of famous paintings on University surfaces. It started the day before Bastille Day when my friend, both artist and Francophile, called me with a suggestion for celebration: chalking “Liberty Leading the People” as a mural on the stage behind White Plaza.

I consider myself neither artist nor Francophile, but was more than grateful for the diversion. We enjoyed it enough that time that we put up a few more reproductions in different locations. In the little vacuum of a summer research position, the only public reaction that made its way back to me was a blurb in the police crawl about graffiti, “not believed to be gang-related or hate-motivated.” But when I moved back onto campus for manager training, I was delighted to find that people had chalked their own abstract designs alongside “Liberty,” and everybody was talking about the wall. I listened anonymously, and then introduced myself to take the credit. Indulgent, I know.

“I think it’s good,” someone said. “It can become, like, public art space now.”

The phenomenon he referred to is well noted in the world of design. As Jane Suri puts it, we learn patterns of behavior from others. All that needs is for those patterns to be publicly established. Stack a few dirty dishes on an empty surface in a cafe, and pretty soon the counter will be full with everyone else’s. Start leaving your fruit stickers on an unused bit of wall space in Columbae, and by the end of the year your managers will be cursing you for the dense layer of paper and adhesive they’re going to have to scrape off. Mark a bathroom stall in Meyer with a provocative bit of “poetry” and, well, we all know what hell can break loose there.

Once we’re aware of the tendency, we can exploit it, in ways both big and small. The street musician throws a few dollars and coins out of his own purse into his case before setting up to play. And once “Liberty Leading” was pictured on a pristine beige wall, it was only a matter of time before she was followed. What I saw at the start of September was a plain wall inching its way over the tipping point, in the Gladwellian sense, into a full mural.

If it ever got there, I missed it. The wall was hosed last week and the art replaced by some cheesy pastel club promotion. Thinking about it now, it could very possibly be a well-executed post-modernist response, but I’m willing to bet that it really is just the Plain Beige World fighting back.

Just because they have water, though, doesn’t mean they win. The burgeoning mural, to me, seemed like the first step in transforming White Plaza into a true center for student culture. It communicated a sense of popular ownership that I hadn’t thought was possible on campus.

So consider this a call to arms. We outnumber them. And chalk is cheap.

Chalking up a few patterns of your own? E-mail [email protected] to collaborate.