In 1989, Jessica Diamond (1957, New York) painted the words ‘I HATE BUSINESS’ on a brick wall in New York. The message is blunt, its critique uncompromising. In just three words, she unequivocally denounced capitalism, and the difficulties artists faced due to an art market that had exploded in 1980s New York. Diamond emerged during this period but resisted its commercial imperatives by turning to site-specific mural painting, drawing on the immediacy and subversive spirit of urban graffiti. Diamond credits the radical urgency of the work to language itself, which she displaces into the controlled environment of the gallery. When presented in a museum or commercial gallery, I Hate Business openly questions the very economic systems that sustain such institutions. Words, the artist’s primary artistic material, erupt across the walls, rendered by hand directly on their surface. They become both pictorial and tactile, set against a carefully painted background that mimics expressive brushstrokes. This creates a productive tension: between the directness of the message and the deliberate care of its execution. The scale of the lettering, adapted to each presentation, underscores this friction, responding to the architecture of the space.