It would be a failure to assume that the street art in Berlin is nothing but “rhetorical backdrop”, or remnants of a past cultural disapproval of a divided Germany, as so many people inaccurately infer. Summing up Berlin’s graffiti as a “cultural phenomenon” is unjust to those who have previously dissented against institutional and governmental practice, as well as those who continue to express objection to political and societal convention. Graffiti is “a manifestation of the social and economic processes that have defined and shaped specific urban spaces at specific moments in time,” and is illustrative of an individual opposition, rather than a public body’s artistic urbanity (Pugh 432).
Photo by Nikki Cotton