Opponents Say Stay Legal, Display Art In Private

Generally, Street Art is quickly dismissed as ‘vandalism’ and an illegal activity when ‘not in private galleries’ or ‘sponsored by non-profits’. Those opposing Street Art keep insisting artists must resort only to “legal” methods of art in the privacy of their homes, while conveniently ignoring the glaring fact that the high-end art world is discriminatory, much to a selective convenience. 

Keep America Beautiful (KAB), a large non-profit with corporate sponsors like H&M, PepsiCo, and McDonalds, began a program in 2007 called Graffiti Hurts. They even offer grants upwards of USD 2,000 to local governments and police departments for fighting Street Art. Their slogan? “We keep America beautiful so Americans can do beautiful things.” Now, the non-profit is conveniently silent on which Americans are given the right to create those “beautiful things?” And, at whose expense?

US Supreme Court Overrules Women's Right Over Their Own Bodies

That US Supreme Court's overruling of the Roe v/s Wade was a dismal imminent was given but worse is the shockingly casual treatment of the event by the world's media and political leaders. 

The nation's inability to transform the 1973 ruling into a legislation was bad enough, but even worse is the effect the overruling has had on the state of women rights in the United States, almost five decades later. 

The nation hasn't flinched while exercising a self-professed moral right to police the rest of the world even formulate state-funded studies to evaluate the extent and reach of women rights across the globe, even as its own lot is affected directly and drastically.

Street Art Must Be Bold, Inspiring Or Make Waves

Street Art has origins from a time we are yet to fathom and, in time, discover. Limited as we are by man-made language, nomenclature, and terminology besides the means so simplistic and apparent like paper and other media, like say walls, Art, and in particular, Street Art, is an extension of that what can be generated on traditional medium but extends to public spaces.

On the European front, skewedly propagated as a world platform, it was in the French Revolution’s iconoclasm era, when rebels defaced high-end art to protest French society’s toxic hierarchy creating a niche called graffiti that became synonymous with vandalism. It was the waves of political and economic turbulence that triggered the rise of street art around the world: The Berlin Wall’s ‘one-sided’ graffiti being projected as a fight of colourful expression on one side versus the stark totalitarianism of bland emptiness on the other being a rather simplistic definition.

The Bias of Commercial Surrogacy Must Be Smashed

Perception, almost always, has a symbiotic relation with perspective. One shapes the other and only in a manner that one can. A person, whose perception is honed, over time and with experience, is perceived as one possessing an exhaustive perspective on the issue. That the perspective is subjective doesn’t matter in the least to a homogenous audience, with views similarly coloured, which conveniently considers it entirely objective. 

The perspective derived from a sea of ‘local’ indigenous experience lies shrouded and, concurrently, unaffected by any external, ‘foreign’ perspective on the ‘local’ issue. This, in a liberal extension of interpretation, can be loosely applied to hard-nosed nationalism usually associated with love for one’s nation and almost always to the exception of every other.

Providing The Healing Balm, Soothing The Hurt

Probably the most peaceful yet powerful influence of Street Art can be gauged by Japanese garden designer Itaru Sasaki who initiated the Wind Phone project in 2010 to help cope with his cousin’s death. After Itaru lost his cousin to terminal cancer, he set up an old telephone booth in his garden in December 2010, to continue to feel connected to him by “talking” to him on the phone. The wind phone was not designed with any specific religious connotation but as a way to reflect on his loss.

However, in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that killed over 15,000 people in the Tohoku region, including over 1,200 people in Ōtsuchi (about 10 percent of the town’s population), he threw access to the structure open to the public. The wind phone since, received more than 30,000 visitors. 

The Star-Spangled Banner Must Dump Legacy Of Hate

"My purpose and my mission is bigger than sports,"​ said hammer thrower and activist Gwen Berry in retort to the backlash following her turning her back to the American flag as the national anthem was being played at the U.S. Olympic Trials on 29 June 2021. 

Competitors DeAnna Price, who won first place, and Brooke Andersen, second place winner, put their hands over their hearts and faced the flag.

I'm here to represent those ... who died due to systemic racism. That's the important part. That's why I'm going. That's why I'm here today

It wasn't the first time she was protesting. In 2019, Berry had protested racial injustice on the medal stand during the Pan American Games in Lima by raising her fist at the end of the national anthem. It fetched her a year-long probation that was eventually overturned.