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Shepard Fairey: Beyond Hope
Will Wilkinson wants Shepard Fairey to triumph in his current copyright fight over the photo at the basis of his now sadly iconic Obama "Hope" image, but still couldn't help but notice that the artist
went from absurdist anarchist vandalism, to a lucrative online business uncreatively ripping off other people’s designs and selling them as his own, to creating powerful and effective political propaganda to help arm a comformist virtuoso of establishment institutions with nuclear weapons. From small-scale guerrilla street art to a running dog of the American political establishment in no time flat. How does this happen?....
If arts scenes, blogs, web video, social networking etc. are largely coopted into producing propaganda for major political parties, then widening access to the means of symbolic production will have failed pathetically to achieve its liberatory potential. In fact, it is all the more insidious when well-equipped citizens use their own time, creativity, and resources simply to consolidate the stultifying terms of Americans politics–to voluntarily join the existing powers in manufacturing consent.
|2.9.09 @ 10:39PM|#
"liberatory potentional"?
What? And I have no idea what the final sentence of the quote
means. Is it English?
|2.9.09 @ 10:50PM|#
He certainly expected payment when we used his work for an ad campaign. His BLK/MRKT Communications is quite the capitalist enterprise. Don't see why AP shouldn't expect the same courtesy.
|2.9.09 @ 10:52PM|#
In completely unrelated news:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/09/liberians.deportation/index.html
Tell me that headline didn't make you do a double-take.
Mark|2.9.09 @ 10:55PM|#
The Che guy has never seen a dime from any of those images. Speaking of communist icons, the guy designed the AK-47 has a decent pension but never got wealthy off the design of the gun either.
Maxime Rainville|2.9.09 @ 11:03PM|#
"In fact, it is all the more insidious when well-equipped
citizens use their own time, creativity, and resources simply to
consolidate the stultifying terms of Americans politics-to
voluntarily join the existing powers in manufacturing
consent."
That's one neat way of summing up the entire Obamania.
I don't care how much Obama spins the "Hope, Change and all that
noise" wheel or how eloquent he might be; he is a politician and
politicians are to me what Klingons are to Captain Kirk: "Don't
believe them. Don't trust them ... Let them die!"
|2.9.09 @ 11:59PM|#
It flies in the face of the very essence of libertarianism to
decry someone for putting their free time to use making something
you find pathetic and stultifying. The people who made the Obama
art, the obama youtube videos, etc etc had every right to do what
they did and hopefully received the rewards they were hoping for,
whether those were money, pride, social esteem or something that
others of us don't entirely understand.
And to think that it's all about Obama really misses the point. A
lot of the people who were creating this stuff were reflecting
dreams, desires, hopes that were only tangentially related to
Obama, and many of them might have found meaning in what they were
doing that can carry on independent of what Obama does as
president. If you're going to criticize the Obama people, criticize
the way that they vote, which is an individual contribution to a
collective enterprise and is an indirect use of force, not the way
they create.
anti-joe|2.10.09 @ 12:05AM|#
I trust McCain Elios' politician, when he says, "Generational Theft" and "...we were going to have change, that change meant we work together." A hippie after my own heart.
|2.10.09 @ 12:08AM|#
The Obama propaganda is nausea inducing.
That said, it's ridiculous for AP to try to claim copyright
infringement cause someone used a photo as a basis for a
painting.
Lots of art is based on random images seen elsewhere. It'd be
really freaking stultifying to have to pay license fees every time
you want to use an image as inspiration.
|2.10.09 @ 12:30AM|#
Jorgen-
Unless we're talking about some bizzaro variation of libertarianism
where criticism = coercion, I fail to see how expressing disgust
with Obamamania flies in the face of libertarianism.
Taktix®|2.10.09 @ 12:42AM|#
Kerry might want to tell her boyfriend that using 10-point-words
may make one sound pretentious, but not necessarily
intelligent.
Brevity, after all, is the soul of wit...
jk|2.10.09 @ 1:34AM|#
There was a short blurb in the feedback section of Mad Magazine,
in one of the issues after the "Hopeless" poster, with Fairey
praising Mad for bringing his art into the pop-culture
mainstream.
My wife threw the issue away, without even using it to wrap
fish.
|2.10.09 @ 7:16AM|#
a comformist virtuoso of establishment
institutions...
I have read that three or four times now and I still don't know
what it means.
highnumber|2.10.09 @ 10:10AM|#
Regarding the essay that shows how Fairey lifts images, I'd give him credit for a few, but I agree with the author for the most part - he's mostly a thief.
Zeb|2.10.09 @ 10:23AM|#
It's a crappy poster that looks like totalitarian iconography, but the AP's case is stupid. A painting of a photograph is not the photograph, and no one is likely to mistake it as such or use it in place of the photo.
|2.10.09 @ 10:27AM|#
Yo, fuck Shepard Fairey. Good to see someone in the MSM call him out on his shit.
|2.10.09 @ 10:52AM|#
"Jorgen-
Unless we're talking about some bizzaro variation of libertarianism
where criticism = coercion, I fail to see how expressing disgust
with Obamamania flies in the face of libertarianism."
Obviously anyone can criticize whatever they want, but the
vocabulary will uses, calling the use of creativity for the major
parties "insidious" and claiming that private citizens are "to
voluntarily join[ing] the existing powers in manufacturing consent"
seems a little different to me than just calling this stuff tacky
and pitiful. He uses vocabulary that suggests that some schmoe with
photoshop who made a tee shirt design is coopting our minds,
forcing conformity and stultifying our discourse; if we can be the
passive victims of someone else's art then free speech doesn't make
a lot of sense. My problem with what Will wrote is that he's giving
no respect to the producers of this stuff as free actors and to the
consumers of this stuff. And the idea that we should be bemoaning
the fact that citizen engagement has failed to live up to its
"liberatory potential" is just so marxist. If we are evaluating
mediums of communication on what the people choose to communicate
with them, rather than the freedom to communicate they allow, then
we're not treating people with the respect deserved by free
people.
I might be reading way too much into Will Wilkinson's absurdly
overwrought vocabulary.
shecky|2.10.09 @ 11:13AM|#
Is there a time when art was not used for propaganda? Art's liberatory potential seems largely a modern pretense and propagandic in it's own way. Most artists today, and throughout history, had to create under the patronage of the moneyed and powerful.
|2.10.09 @ 11:47AM|#
Who cares, the guy makes posters and sells them. You're hit by "propaganda" from McDonalds and Coke every single day. What a bunch of wankery.
|2.10.09 @ 11:51AM|#
Fairey's probably in the wrong, as far as copyrights covering
derivative works are concerned. See the Jeff Koons 'String of
Puppies" case (Rogers vs. Koons).
It's not that anyone would mistake Fairey's image for the photo,
it's that his image could (and has) become more widespread than the
original, therefore potentially impacting the profit from the photo
itself.
Had Fairey used his design as a satire/parody of the original
photo, he would be in the clear, but that's far from the
situation.
But that doesn't mean that the copyright law itself isn't garbage.
Protecting innovation by stifling innovation in others doesn't make
a whole lot of sense.
Colonel_Angus|2.10.09 @ 12:05PM|#
Fuck him. Every time I see that shit it makes me feel like I'm
in red square. Intellectual property FTW.
Dumb sellout writer.
|2.10.09 @ 12:12PM|#
jorgen, do you just not get it?
Libertarians are opposed to using the tools of the state. We are
all about a vibrant civil culture, definitely including
name-calling and withering criticism of the citizenry by each
other.
Calling out this guy (or any other) in the marketplace of ideas
isn't just consistent with libertarianism, it is essential to
libertarianism.
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