BEIRUT, Lebanon – Last year, during municipal elections in Beirut, posters bearing the shadowy image of a man named Al Murashah started appearing on walls that line the streets of Beirut. He took his place next to the many thousands of images of familiar sectarian leaders that become ubiquitous during Lebanon’s political seasons.

But Al Murashah was a fiction, a candidate invented by an underground art group called Heartland. This year, during Lebanon’s first elections without the presence of Syrian troops in almost 30 years, Heartland was back, not with Al Murashah, but with a project they call “Propaganda.” Instead of a generic face, they’ve posted blank sheets of paper.

The work was intended as a counterpoint to the explosion of visuals that have confronted the Lebanese over the last four months of tumult: the assassination of a former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, the protests against Syrian occupation, and the current parliamentary elections, which continue through June 19.

The owner of an art gallery here who is in touch with the Heartland group, Sandra Dagher, said the blank sheets of paper represented a protest to the riot of political messages, a graphic counterattack to the slick election placards, protest banners, graffiti, and T-shirts everywhere.

Once a leader in the Arab arts world, Lebanon has enjoyed a flurry of artistic production in recent months. Galleries that specialize in selling high-end abstract art to wealthy collectors have turned to painters with overt political themes. Photographers and writers have embraced the events known as the Cedar Revolution, parsing its meaning and criticizing its direction. With the sudden departure of a military presence that younger Lebanese had lived with their entire lives, there is a vacuum in Lebanon. Everything about Lebanese culture and identity, it seems, is on the table.

Among the first to rush in after the assassination of Hariri on February 14 were the musicians. Dozens of songs have been composed lamenting Hariri’s death, adding to a rich culture of political music. Even the militant Shiite group Hezbollah uses composers to get its message out.

Songs that became very popular during the protests include “Beirut Is Crying” and “No, the Story Hasn’t Ended,” the latter with lyrics such as, “No, the story hasn’t ended, no, this is not the end, no we haven’t forgotten, you’re still living in us, and our hope is still our aim.”

Many of the Hariri songs found their way to the desk of the chief executive of Virgin Megastores of Lebanon, Jihad Murr. Most of them, he said, were composed and recorded too quickly to have any lasting value. More interesting, Mr. Murr added, was how a body of pre-existing music, recorded by a generation of Lebanese stars touched by the civil war, was put to new use at the rallies. Recordings by popular vocalists such as Majida Roumi and Julia Boutros were put to service as unifying elements, much like the Lebanese flag took on new importance as a nonsectarian patriotic symbol.

Also quick to enter the cultural fray were the photographers, designers, and visual artists who documented and contributed to the surge of newly revived patriotic imagery – photographs, banners, T-shirts, armbands, face painting, even cedar tree designs shaved into hair on men’s heads. Photographer Christian Catafago has published a collection of essays and photographs created during the headiest moments of the March street rallies; it’s filled with images of the Lebanese flag.

As with Heartland, Mr. Catafago produced his book anonymously. In a country where names are often markers of religious background, anonymity is seen as a way of speaking to the public without invoking potentially divisive issues of identity.

Mr. Catafago’s book celebrates the frenzy of the spring protests but raises a question that haunts many Lebanese: How can they turn that energy into change in their society? The photographs in the beginning of his book show a flurry of motion and the crush of the crowds. At the end, he shows the iconic red-and-white “Independence 05” stickers that were everywhere during the protests, torn off and abandoned on the ground.

“What use is it for the country to replace some by others?” he asked in his book. “They’ve only taken advantage of the system, nothing more. It is the system that needs to be transformed and some accountability be brought in.”

What Lebanon’s artists do in their work every day – weighing the claims of memory and reconciliation, optimism and cynicism, personal and collective identity – has emerged with new urgency as the country struggles to chart a more democratic future without Syria’s dominating presence.

A producer and director with more than 40 documentaries to his credit, Philippe Aractingi, is finishing what he said was the first feature film produced and funded in Lebanon since the civil war that ravaged the country from 1975 to 1990. Tentatively titled “The Autobus” (a reference to the attack on a bus that sparked the country’s civil war), the new movie is a musical with a Bollywood sheen. It follows a group of young dancers who are trying to introduce a contemporary techno version of the classic Lebanese dance, the dabke.

Although he has been working on the film for years, its central themes – the tension between global and Lebanese culture, and Western influence and Lebanese traditionalism – are rising to the surface once again, as the Lebanese question whether the country’s cultural identity will be dissolved by greater political and economic integration into the Western world.

It’s difficult to gauge the degree to which the work of Lebanese artists, many of them cultural elites drawn from the country’s Christian minority, has an influence on the wider political dialogue.

In the cosmopolitan Hamra neighborhood, the Agial Art Gallery featured a painting by the Syria-based Sabhan Adam. It has filled a canvas with dark, screaming faces, violent X shapes, and the colors of the Lebanese flag.

Even the distinction between cheap, mass-produced forms and “high art,” made to last longer and appeal to more discriminating tastes, has taken on a political dynamic. The Lebanese, critics argue, have become very good at producing “instant” culture – graphic design, fashion, pop music – while they let a deeper and potentially more unifying artistic culture languish.

“Beirut has become the capital of kitsch,” said a professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut, Samir Khalaf, who sees a post-civil war tendency to escapism in Lebanon’s taste for “mass consumerism” and “public entertainment.”

There is also a deep undercurrent of nostalgia in the current artistic efflorescence. An exhibition of photographs and texts at the Goethe Institute, titled “Shared Spaces in Times of Crisis,” contrasts images of Beirut from the 1950s and ’60s with images from the civil war and its aftermath. The texts recall Beirut as an open, intellectually and culturally vibrant city, and suggest its future is to return to that past.

“Beirut scares them,” one panel declares, referring to Arab leaders in the region. “It has always been the source of their terror, for in its journals, clubs, and theaters, it used to uncover all the anti-humane practices taking place in this Arab capital or that. Its freedom is their constant worry, its democracy their fear.”