Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey
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Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm WELCOME TO MARK VALLEN'S "ART FOR A CHANGE" WEBSITE Homepage Biography Main Gallery Punk Portraits Works for Sale Blog Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey A critique by artist Mark Vallen Published on the occasion of Fairey’s Los Angeles solo exhibition, Dec., 2007. [ View the Critical Voices section at the bottom of this page for additional opinions.] Black Panther Most well known for his "Obey Giant" street posters, Shepard Fairey has carefully nurtured a reputation as a heroic Sam Durant, Bobby ... guerilla street artist waging a one man campaign against the corporate powers-that-be. Infantile posturing aside, Best Price $17.00 Fairey’s art is problematic for another, more troubling reason - that of plagiarism. or Buy New Lincoln Cushing, Josh MacPhee, and Favianna Rodriguez, worked closely with me on researching this article, having initially brought Fairey’s plagiarism to my attention. Cushing is an art historian and author of Revolución: Cuban Poster Art, Visions of Peace & Justice, and Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Josh MacPhee is an artist, activist and author of Privacy Information Stencil Pirates: A Global Survey of the Street Stencil, and Favianna Rodriguez is an artist, activist and Chicana print maker. Their invaluable research and documentation provides the foundation for most of what appears in this article. What initially disturbed me about the art of Shepard Fairey is that it displays none of the line, modeling and other idiosyncrasies that reveal an artist’s Stencil Pirates unique personal style. His imagery appears as though it’s xeroxed or run Josh MacPhee through some computer graphics program; that is to say, it is machine art Best Price $9.88 or Buy New $13.60 that any second-rate art student could produce. In fact, I’ve never seen any evidence indicating Fairey can draw at all. Even the art of Andy Warhol, reliant as it was upon photography and mass Privacy Information commercial imagery, displayed passages of gestural drawing and flamboyant brushstrokes. [ Left: Still fro m directo r Michael Anderson’s 1956 film adaptation of George Orwell’s cautionary story of a dystopic future, 1984. Right: Fairey unmistakably stole his image from the "Big Brother is Watching You" propaganda posters used in Anderson’s film, without crediting the source. Fairey has developed a successful career through expropriating and recontextualizing the artworks of others, which in and of itself does not make for bad art. Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein based his paintings on the world of American comic strips and advertising Soviet Posters imagery, but one was always aware that Lichtenstein was taking his images from comic books; that was after all the point, to examine Maria Lafont the blasé and artificial in modern American commercial culture. When Lichtenstein painted Look Mickey, a 1961 oil on canvas portrait Best Price $11.89 of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, everyone was cognizant of the artist’s source material - they were in on the joke. By contrast, or Buy New $16.50 Fairey simply filches artworks and hopes that no one notices - the joke is on you. Plagiarism is the deliberate passing off of someone else’s work as your own, and Shepard Fairey may be unfamiliar with the term - but not the act. This article is not about the innocent absorption of visual ideas that later materialize unconsciously in an artist’s work, Privacy Information we do after all live in a maelstrom of images and we can’t help but be affected by them. Nor am I referring to an artist’s direct influences - which artist can claim not to have been inspired by techniques or styles employed by others? What I am concerned with is the brazen, intentional copying of already existing artworks created by others - sometimes duplicating the originals without alteration - and then deceiving people by pawning off the counterfeit works as original creations. Fairey launched his career with a series of obscure street posters, stickers and stencils that combined the words "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" with the visage of deceased wrestling superstar, Andre the Giant. The Art of the Fillmore By the early 1990’s the incomprehensible images had become ubiquitous Gayle Lemke, Jacae... in major urban centers around the world, but in 1993 Titan Sports, Inc. Best Price $198.51 (now World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.) threatened to sue Fairey for or Buy New violating their trademarked name, Andre the Giant. Fairey responded to the threatened lawsuit by altering his portrait of the famous wrestler, combining the new image with the word, "Obey". Privacy Information Fairey’s self-titled "absurdist propaganda" campaign was born. The supposed intent of the project, according to the artist, was to: "stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the campaign and their relationship with their surroundings - because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the motive is not [ Left: Meeting - Vladimir Kozlinsky. Linocut. 1919. Kozlinsky’s obvious." depiction o f workers listening to a revo lutionary agitato r. Middle top: Fairey’s plagiariz ed version o f Ko z linsky’s lino cut. Right: Have You Volunteered? - Dmitry Moor. Famous recruitment poster for It’s not surprising such pointless twaddle passes for a weighty aesthetic the Soviet Red Army. 1920. Middle bottom: Fairey’s plagiariz ed version of Moor’s Red Army poster. Black Panthers 1968 statement of purpose - these days any amateur with a minimally written Ruth-Marion Baruch... crackpot manifesto can make waves in the world of art - but I still can’t Fairey simply attached his portrait of Andre the Giant to these two Best Price $48.31 imagine a more juvenile-sounding rationalization for an art project, Soviet prints, added the words "Obey Giant", and then took full or Buy New especially when current conditions cry out for art that is socially engaged credit fo r the wo rks as o riginal designs. Fairey is selling his rip-o ff and introspective. Instead of meaningful insights into how propaganda versio n o f Ko z linsky’s Meeting as cellphone wallpaper on the Jamster.com website. Jamster is owned by Newscorp, the systems work - even in democratic societies - Fairey gives us silly co rpo rate media co nglomerate fo unded by right-wing billio naire portraits of a dead wrestling champion. The artist toys with the veneer of and owner of the Fox News network, Rupert Murdoch, ] Privacy Information 1 of 8 10/1/2009 8:48 AM Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm radical politics, but his views are hollow and non-committal. Perhaps the most important falsehood concerning Fairey’s behavior is that it is motivated by some grand theory of aesthetics or weighty Che Guevara political philosophy - but I’m afraid the only scheme at work is the one David Kunzle intended to make Fairey wealthy and famous. Some have, for whatever Best Price $31.75 or Buy New reason, imagined Fairey to be a progressive political figure, a perception certainly cultivated by the artist; but it’s also not impossible to view Fairey’s work as right-wing in essence, since it largely ransacks leftist history and imagery while the artist laughs all the way to the bank. Privacy Information For me, the question is not what Fairey’s political allegiances may or may not be, but rather, how his work sets a standard that is ultimately [ Left: Political power comes from the barrel of a gun - Artist damaging to art and leads to its further dissolution. When a will to unknown. 1968. Chinese poster from the Great Proletarian Cultural plagiarize and a love for self-promotion are the only requirements Revolution period. The title of this poster quotes the famous necessary for becoming an artist, then clearly the arts are in deep pronouncement made by Mao Tse-Tung. Right: Fairey's plagiariz ed version titled, Guns and Roses. The Chinese poster's central motif of trouble. hands bearing machine guns was plainly digitally scanned without any alteration. Fairey, or his assistants, then applied a modified sun-burst background, placed clip-art roses in the gun barrels, and released the Reproduce and Revolt imitatio n in 2006 as a suppo sed o riginal wo rk.] Josh MacPhee, Favi... Best Price $5.57 or Buy New $12.08 If the façade of Fairey’s false-front leftism is put aside, it’s fairly clear that what remains is little more than an apolitical black hole. Conceivably the following example will raise an eyebrow or two, not just because it’s proof positive of Fairey’s total and complete ignorance of history - which for him exists only as a source of images to be exploited - but because it should make obvious that anyone so ill-informed should not be in the vanguard of today’s political art. Privacy Information In 2006 Fairey printed a near exact copy of an already existing skull and crossbones artwork he found, altering the original design only by adding the words "OBEY: Defiant Since '89" along with a small star bearing the face of Andre the Giant. The image was reproduced as a T-shirt and added to Fairey’s OBEY fashion line. As luck would have it, Wal-Mart plagiarized the master plagiarist, copying and Revolucion! printing Fairey’s rip-off and adding it to the superstore’s own fashion line. A shopper Lincoln Cushing at Wal-Mart recognized the skull motif’s origin and angrily protested - as it was an Best Price $8.98 exact duplication of the infamous logo belonging to the Gestapo, the Nazi "secret or Buy New $13.57 state police" that served as personal bodyguards to Adolf Hitler and administered the concentration camps where the genocide of the Jewish people was put into practice.