It was the word "grafitti" as grafitti that alerted me, slowly, to the duel at Sixth and Howard.

I noticed on a wall there the word "grafitti" really big, all caps. It was sort of in pointy grafitti letters style, only much more legible. They wanted to be perfectly clear.

It was dated and momented in April, 2011. It said something like April 11, 2011, 1:32 a.m.

The moment was about three days before I first noticed. I went that way two weeks after I first noticed, and it was gone, completely obliterated by shiny black paint. It wasn't like where people paint out grafitti and leave a grafitti shaped blotch. The whole wall was painted black and painted well.

This keeps happening. Someone keeps putting up skilled grafitti on that wall, interesting and never the same twice, and someone else keeps doing an excellent job of painting it out.

Last time I noticed, some the grafitti was playing with the black background. White mysterious figures of power were painted on the black. A human skull with some fur on it. A tentacled figure with a friendly or maybe ominous grin.The work had a title, "Dark Matter."

Further down the wall, letters said "The Art of Grafitti." Really large letters. One of the f's extended from almost touching the sidewalk to my shoulder. They were three-D looking letters like used to be used for epic Hollywood movies, letters that look like they are built like the Egyptian pyramids.

I would expect that's probably painted out by now.

This is all happening on the side of an art gallery.

I miss a lot of installments because I don't go right there very often. To me, 6th and Howard and around there combines crummy, in some directions, and boring, in other directions, in ways that don't draw me.

But that wall is neither crummy nor boring. It is high quality grafitti and high quality painting out of grafitti.

If you go to look at it, and it's in its dark phase, right across Howard is lots of pretty good grafitti that doesn't go away so frequently and totally. It also isn't of such consistently high quality, though it may be done by the same people.

And of course, if it's business hours, you could go into the art gallery, which doesn't feature grafitti.