The movement of 68 saw the beginning of so-called avant-garde art, which we associate with pop art, conceptual art and performance art – among other genres – . Around 1980 a group of new artists appeared on the scene. In many cases they had completed official art studies, but they were strongly molded by punk attitudes: influential examples (for Banksy too, for instance) were the anarchist punks around the band Crass in England, the painters known as the New Wild Ones in Cologne and Düsseldorf, the neo-expressionist painters and pochoirists, i.e. stencil artists, in Paris and on the East Village art scene in New York. All of them hovered between the art academy and the spirit of punk. Sometimes they were more political, sometimes less so, and they were committed to the do-it-yourself credo: vite fait bien fait or "quick 'n' dirty"; in other words rather crude, brief and concise than technically perfect. That could also be said of the music they favored: pieces with just three chords and now lasting only three minutes – street art as a visual equivalent to punk rock.

"The directness of stenciling was part of its anti-cultural appeal. You could make a lot of visual noise very quickly." (Jane Bauman, stencil graffiti artist from California and lender to this exhibition).

Often coming from an earlier protest culture, particularly also political graffiti by feminists and early LGBTQIA+, environmentalists, animal conservationists and members of the peace movement helped to get street art off the ground.