Shepard Fairey: Obama Skeptics Suffering from False Consciousness

At long last, Shepard Fairey, the "street artist" behind the Obama "hope" campaign (who, on the side, designs logos for Mountain Dew and brings Rodchenko-inspired Soviet constructivism to Saks Fifth Avenue) has weighed in on the Obama-as-Joker poster controversy:

"I have my doubts about the person's intelligence," Fairey said on the phone from Pittsburgh. "It's not grammatically correct. It would be 'socialist' … Obama is not Marx. He didn't create socialism."

Fairey, professional Obama hagiographer and arbiter of what counts as intelligent political discourse, might want to look into Robert Owen and the early socialists that predated Marx. And as the Los Angeles Times slyly notes, this is a matter of semantics not grammar—and his point still makes no sense. But I pick nits:

"A lot of these things are fueled by frustration," Fairey said. "Maybe they're frustrated and don't understand the whole situation."

But who is Fairey to criticize the nefarious Obama poster when he himself is responsible for numerous artworks that …painted President Bush as the villain? "My frustration with Bush was fueled by a very clear understanding of what's going on," he asserted.

Got that? If you don't support Obama, you must be a frustrated, confused halfwit who doesn't quite understand why the government would give Americans $4500 for a 2004 Dodge Dakota. As an amateur scholar of Marxism who has a pretty clear understanding of "what's going on," Fairey is doubtless referencing Engels' idea of "false consciousness," but presumes us Obama skeptics are too thick for such profundities.

I wrote about the future of political art in the age of Obama here.