KINGSTON, N.Y. — The red goats of Kingston came from nowhere. One day there were new, clunky white planters in the stockade district and then, mysteriously, in October they became canvases for about 37 stenciled goats, red on white, like ghost goats from another world.

And then the red goats went everywhere. Thanks in part to a Facebook page, the goats have become a favored form of graffiti art far from this Hudson Valley town — at the Marcy Avenue subway stop and the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn, in Missouri, Michigan and Canada, at the Art Basel show in Miami Beach.

It’s not entirely clear what the red goats mean. It’s not entirely clear they mean anything. But as an object lesson of how fast images can spread in the digital world and how quickly they can come to stand for many different things, even if they began as standing for nothing, consider the blank white planter, the red goat and a tattoo artist with not much to do on the streets of Kingston.