Street artists active in today’s modern society increasingly find themselves faced with the moral quandary posed by the commodification of resistance. Much like the conflict presented by gentrification’s rampant influence in the world’s most infamous cities, there are two edges to this sword. Sure, exposure is a wonderful, worthwhile thing that allows an artist both the funding necessary to bring their vision to fruition and a wide, enthusiastic audience to encounter that vision. To that end, gentrification also showers downtrodden communities with unforeseen wealth, attracting additional community attention that can bring meaningful interventions in the form of new public buildings and businesses. However, both forces embody a sort of bastardization of authenticity. “While we like elements of what you are,” these forces seem to condescendingly say, “but only the pretty side that we can sell to the upper classes.”
MTO addresses this tension between the desire for widespread prestige and the notion of selling out for a lesser cause in his piece “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” completed as part of the Berlin Mural Fest on June 12th, 2018. As part of his work with the festival, MTO was provided with a large, prominent wall that was already home to an advertisement for bottled water.
The artist seized this opportunity to comment on the commercialization of street art, which he refers to as “the elephant in the room” by depicting a man in typical street garb painting two additional clean and standardized advertisements above the original one. The incorporation of the original image adds to the artist’s well-known use of hyperrealistic techniques. Furthermore, MTO took specific measures to ensure his work here remains as democratic as possible. He painted the anamorphosis piece in a manner such that only those photographing it from the street can achieve the proper, final image. Any party looking to use expensive equipment such as a drone to capture a more desirable angle will be crestfallen to find that the image appears distorted from other angles.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity” marks MTO’s tenth anniversary of becoming a street artist and the fifth anniversary of his departure from Berlin. Born and raised in France, the artist moved to Berlin in 2006 and his career subsequently blossomed. His most widely seen pieces are those featuring iconic celebrities and well-known movie scenes. MTO left the German city he’d called home for seven years with one final swan song: A large mural reading, “Ciao Berlin!” To this day he remains anonymous, his location reading, “Nowhere, Planet Earth”.
Berlin Mural Festival hosted its inaugural showing in May 2018. The festival seeks to enliven the city by inviting street art’s “kings and queens” to adorn its walls with oversized artworks that generate pulsating beats of personality. In covering over 10,000 square meters in a variety of locales throughout the city, Berlin Mural Festival has essentially created “the largest open air gallery Berlin has ever seen”. The festival invites viewers to “come around and chill with us.”
Despite the festival’s success, MTO can’t help but question his role in his beloved city’s “zombification”. Berlin counts itself among numerous other bustling metropolises where the creative forces that originally attracted new inhabitants are steadily being priced out of their homes. In 2014, two artist JR and Blu painted over their infamous murals in Kreuzberg, explaining “we felt it was time for them to vanish, along with the fading era in Berlin’s history that they represented,” in an opinion article published by The Guardian. Of the part he plays in this rebellion against profiteering off of rebellion, MTO writes, “In my case, I like being a muralist, and I’d like to keep being one. But I don’t want to help this process happen. So the only way I found to fight against it is to use openly political and always contextual content in my murals as a way to try to connect with local communities, create debate and maybe block (or at least slow down) the economical exploitation of it. But does it really work and Is it enough ? I don’t know ….”
MTO: facebook | instagram | vimeo
Berlin Mural Fest: website | facebook | instagram
