Graffiti Is Today's Cultural Legacy

This week sees a most unusual ceremony taking place at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. A grave is being reopened. But it’s a case of restoration rather than exhumation. Oscar Wilde’s massive memorial – a flying naked angel, designed by the young Jacob Epstein and inspired by Assyrian figures in the British Museum – has been scrubbed clean of decades of red lipstick kisses and graffiti tributes (“Wilde child we remember you,” “keep looking at the stars”) left by besotted admirers.