Assuming you don't have a couple of the Obama "Hope" posters, stickers, signs and their variants about the house, here's the story. Artist Shepard Fairey, previously best known for his "Andre the Giant has a posse" stickers and their variants, was the graffiti artist who caught the bijou for the Campaign Poster of the Century.
This month, Fairey's got problems, but they're problems that any American artist with a desire for political relevance would welcome. First of all, the Associated Press is now claiming that his famous "Hope" poster infringes on the copyright of one of their photos of Obama, shown above. Fairey acknowledges that he used the photo as the basis for his poster, but he claims in his countersuit that his work transformed it into "stunning, abstracted and idealized visual image that creates powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message." (I don't see any political motives on the AP's part. They have to protect their copyrights.)
Over at Print magazine, Milton Glaser weighs in (http://www.printmag.com/design_articles/MiltonGlaseronShepardFairey/tabid/492/Default.aspx) by saying that Fairey's work doesn't seem as transformative as it could be. In this case, I disagree, but I link to it because it's Milton Glaser and his opinion shouldn't be ignored. To my amateur's eye, the Fairey poster uses the AP photo as a basis, but it doesn't try to reproduce it, and I think it's sufficiently different to qualify as a separate work.
Okay, now for the critical stuff. This month, the ICA in Boston has opened a show of Fairey's work, and concomitant on that, Fairey announced that he'd be tagging the town as he has been for years. A few Andre stencils went up around town, so the Boston police promptly arrested him. Fairey claims that the timing of the arrest is politically suspect, which is actually pretty funny when you consider that he'd done the tagging to drum up attention for the art exhibit in the first place.
It'd be even funnier if another artist were to start tagging around Boston, get arrested... and turn his or her case into a referendum on the disparities in legal representation between unknown graffiti artists and famous, marketable artists with big social and gallery connections who can attract high-power legal help.
Here's where we can see a real and profound difference between Shepard Fairey and Banksy, a British graffiti artist whose work is at least as well known. Yes, both have courted controversy. yes, both have courted confrontation with the Law. And yes, both have had gallery shows. They have that in common.
But Fairey just isn't much of an artist. His work says almost nothing beyond his skill as a graphic designer. He's got a great design sense, and he's developed solid technique. (Or he may just have that trace-from-bitmap function in Photoshop down pat.) Fairey himself is adept at reciting the boilerplate complaints about consumer society, marketing, corporate culture and the like, but there's no special insight there. (I mean, I've been reading Noam Chomsky for twenty years, and that doesn't make my blog posts or Clark Park newsletters "political.") But, because Fairey does commercial-grade work, and sells to a market that claims progressive politics, he's considered a political artist. And he's one who gets gallery shows and top-notch legal help when he prods the cops for some publicity.
Think I'm being unfair? Take a look at Banksy's work. You can't imagine him doing posters for some political candidate; it'd be like getting Ralph Steadman to draw baby-food labels. He doesn't go tagging and expect to pull in high-power legal help from wealthy museum patrons: he goes tagging on the separation walls in the West Bank and expects to get shot at. While Fairey's actively courted the sympathies of wealthy liberals, Banksy's as likely to savage them as anyone else. His work is savagely funny, in ways that don't confirm that you "already know." And Banksy can draw a lot better than Fairey, too.
You look at Banksy's work, and you think of Johnny Rotten and Monty Python. You look at Shepard Fairey's work, and you think of flyers on the virtues of fair-trade coffee shops.
