As an artist I’m not a fan of setting limits on subject or medium for expression. It goes against my very core of who I am.

Also one of the key roles that artists do is challenge the establishment and force things that need to be addressed.

As a property owner who has been vandalized by graffiti on my house, I have to say I don’t really approve it so much.

Between this arrest and the AP smackdown, it seems like Fairey’s in the shade lately. Is it time for a preemptive presidential pardon? Obama should craft a criminal and civil get-out-of-jail-free card for the artist that icon-ed his campaign.

Since part of the art of graffiti is breaking the law, then part of the art of graffiti is not getting caught or having to pay it up to the Man if you do get caught. Oops.

yeah, it’s not like the crafted doc would never get used again.
this is still a “baby” police state till Obi gets around to getting it cleaned up!
s

Also an artist, I’m on the fence regarding whether his work qualifies as “fair use.” The resemblance to the original is striking. Too bad the permissions issue wasn’t resolved before the image was adopted by the campaign.

Regarding graffiti, for me it depends on where it is. On a boxcar, no problem. When I discovered some on a rock formation at Garden of the Gods National Park in Colorado I thought it incredibly annoying. I haven’t heard anything specific regarding the charges against Fairey and will reserve judgment until I know what he did.

For those who may not know the history of Fairey’s work, the Wikipedia has a good start (). Andre the Giant Has a Posse.
Fairey is a phenomenologist, favoring street art, and his iconic “OBEY” posters that sprouted everywhere (not just Boston) in the late 1990s, without fanfare or explanation, were the street equivalent of a viral video on youtube. I’m speaking of the spare hairless face poster, accompanied only by the word “Obey”, that sparked anti-authoritarian visions of Orwellian police states, which in retrospect seem prophetic.

Anyone else have that feeling?

Bob in HI

heh, i think i met this cat running around in the mid-90’s in philly spray painting andre the giant on stuff.

That was unauthorized use of Andre the Giant’s likeness. It’s one thing to play fast and loose with the rules when you’re unknown but once you become high profile and (presumably) well compensated, your sources of inspiration are likely to become litigious.

I got a severe scolding from a high school art teacher for basing drawings on other peoples’ photos. Made a lasting impression on me. The two ethical choices are to take your own photos or obtain the permission of the parties that owns them.

that gets into the whole ‘media remix’ issue.

Jane has a new post

Quite.

How did they originally catch him doing the graffitti on the Bridge and the Turnpike entrance? Why didn’t they arrest him on those circumstances?

Or are they making the arrest simply because they found “similarities” in the tag to Fairey’s work?

If so, that could really be a problem to support in Court since the guys iconic images are used as stencil art by graffitti artists nationwide.

What law enforcement arrested him? Chicago cops, the bastion of cultural understanding? And in front of a museum with his own first major exhibition inside? It is an outrage and we are a culturally confused society.
Why is an artist condemned for newspaper photograph to as raw material to create an abstracted color print that communicates the idea of a cultural moment? Or using other “found” symbols that carry cultural weight and putting them in places where they can communicate ideas to an audience that doesn’t visit a museum or gallery. Corporations place billboards and posters everywhere that are to designed to communicate “don’t think”.
As an artist and ex-museum art educator; I am discouraged that the visual idea of “appropriation” can be so misunderstood by non-artists and, sadly, too may liberal thinking Americans.
The work of an artist is to see the world around us, and create a visual side of an open-ended conversation with anyone, everyone. It is free speech.
The portrait is an abstraction of a photograph…an abstraction that harkens to the social realism of the thirties…a perfectly appropriate cultural allusion. To say they look alike is a superficial and inaccurate critique. It is easy to see where the artist has altered the image; made a portrait of Obama through his eye, hand and mind. If you had seen only the printed work Fairey printed you would never have said “Oh. he painted it from a photograph.” Are artists required to hire a sitter and paint only what is in front of them?
The poster format, too, has art historical significant in the art of societies during periods of change or upheaval, just as the idea of anonymously “posting” is a technique used by people who are estranged from from a dominant media. Broadsides (a better term for this kind of art) are a treasured art form and a crucial element to any cultural movement in all societies that use the 2-D communication.
Regretfully, capitalism’s advertising excesses have tainted the form, dismissed it as graffiti and criminalized the creative urge to communicate with the general public.

As an AP photo it is a news source and thus fair use applies. (But you should look into fairy’s own lawsuits against others, just for the fun of it)
However, his work is far from an abstract rendering: it’s a stencil. it’s faithful trace of a photo. This is fine. It’s a perfectly valid art form and this piece, like many of Fairey’s, is appealing and technically proficient. But let’s not kid ourselves. His work conveys as much deep social commentary as the editorial page of USA Today. To elevate the meaning of his work is seriously misguided. His explanation behind his ‘obey’ campaign is muddled twaddle–A theory constructed after the andre the giant stickers first started getting noticed around new england. But I can understand the attraction. They’re pretty pieces.
You’re right about the historical significance of broadsheets during periods of revolution made by anonymous artists risking a lot. it’s funny you mention this:
http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm
(I urge you to take a look at this.)
but that’s the problem– fairy isn’t an anonymous artist helping the struggle for change. he’s a famous grafitti artist. And if I were cynical enough I would say his posters were great advertising– billboards for shep. although, he made campaign propaganda fun and exciting, so I can’t really bust on him for that. I really liked the image. However,the first rule of grafitti is don’t get caught. That’s part of the game, right?

btw– second line of Lisa’s article— it’s Boston.

Look, if he did the graffiti on someone else’s property, then it’s a fair cop and he has absolutely zero reason to complain.

What difference does it make that the cops arrested him before his show, exactly? Should we make the justice system take a back seat to some guy making money? If so, why put anyone in jail? After all, it’s pretty much always an inconvenience to the person being incarcerated, and they probably have ‘better’ things to do, other places to be, what have you. A lot of murderers have families who’ll miss them; won’t somebody please think of the children! Etc.

If he didn’t do the crime of course, it’d be another matter, and possibly a juicy civil suit.

Just as an aside, does it strike anyone else as odd that a graffiti artist, i.e. an artist who commits petty crimes routinely to get attention, is now the subject of a pity party as he gets attention… for his (alleged) petty crime? Again, if he did it, surely this falls under the cost of doing business.

Hmmm. Curious this happened in Boston. This is a liberal town with a very powerful police force beholden to the national Republican party. They were the ones who were threatening to picket the Democratic National Convention in 2004. They did manage to cause Kerry trouble by picketing some of meetings in Boston beforehand that he was supposed to have attended. They endorsed both Bushes when Massachusetts Democrats were running against them. The state police actually shut down the state Democratic Convention during a contract dispute.

I’m a union member and proud of it. But I do wonder why the political shenanigans of police and fire unions, which ARE exactly what anti-union types complain about, never get brought up by the right-wingers.

Thank you…there is a broader critique with which I unaware. Now that I have learned the broader context from Mark Vallen, I am properly chastised as an out-of-touch 61 year old sculptor. For the last eight years I have been confronting a personal struggle to make studio work that spoke my political mind and had finally found comfort with the words of Randolph Bourne.

Apologies should not be immediately followed by buts. Allow me to ruminate a moment…

I am too late posting this…I hope it is a dialogue that we might re-discover in some other art-politics world.
This is not, perhaps, the appropriate forum but: art is life and, in this new day of change, I vow to bring unity to my ethical and moral life. These are my additional thoughts regarding.
• I am not wholly comfortable with graffiti as a game with criminal consequences. The psychological urge to make marks is essential to humans and the range of society’s power to exact punishment can far exceed the damage. Graffiti as social expression – hobo signs on picket fences, Kilroys throughout Europe, tags on trucks and traincars- is communication. I am more disgusted by the visual lies of ever-present outside advertising than the initials of a kid hurriedly spray-painted on a wall or a 8X10 photocopy of a lost child stapled to a telephone pole. While graffiti is not necessarily the considered act of art-making, it can, and has risen to that, if the graffiti mark-maker chooses. I believe in the practice of visual thinking and the possibility of that mark-making becoming art-making. Our society should have the capacity to understand, facilitate and celebrate this natural human mark-making. Public means public; but the off-balance of power creates a convenient monoculture. Some individual and civic attempts have been made with some affect, like, the % for art programs, neighborhood wall murals and designated bulletin boards; but the problems of propriety, property and power remain largely unexamined and the notion of art as thinking becomes muddled by committee.
• Mark Vallen’s essay is notice to all artists. Fairey should acknowledge and deliberately reference WPA posters into his images, or his conversations. That would be acting honestly with his general audience. In turn, audiences would be informed about a period of American history when government understood Art as valuable work. Not a bad idea to be resurfacing now. We owe it to our work to educate each other to our cultural obligations and shun those in our circle who fail to recognize this responsibility, particularly in times of possibility and progress. Ethical self-monitoring, as Vallen has shown in his essay, is what the art world needs- just as in the world of journalists, pundits, lawyers, doctors, etc.
• The Obama Hope poster situation makes me aware once again of the failure to fully integrate the professions of the arts into the American culture. The communication value of Fairey’s 30s broadside imagery was understood by the Obama campaign but the backstory, the oeurve, was not. Only narrow questions about legal ramifications of “appropriation” and prior distribution were involved. Critical perspectives like Vallen’s were probably not even considered. (I didn’t see more than the poster and made assumptions that the artist was aware of his role.) Discussions of artistic authenticity and derivative art are critique based, not the top priority of a general election campaign and easily overlooked through expediency. It is hard for me to lay fault on the campaign because, as Mark Vallen’s analysis clarifies, it is first the ethical responsibility of the artist in society.
• Which brings me to the point that the artists have responsibility for more than the making of art. We owe something to the understanding of art, the appreciation of art. The practice of “appropriation” requires ethical responsibility. Not just because of legal obligation but because transparency always provides opportunity for more understanding, more complex thinking and the nurturing of ideas. The sources should be important to us, and made in some way accessible to interested viewers, so the communication is enriched with embedded layers of cultural meaning and provides a wider context for our visual ideas.
• RE: the specific case of the Fairey Obama posters: despite the use of clear WPA visual vocabulary, IMO, this object is valid “appropriation”. It is not in this case plagiarism or copyright infringement. The imagery is abstracted through layers of stenciling and printing. The series was done as broadsides in the style and spirit of WPA posters. Visual choices were made and it is not the theft of a photograph…it may be the work of an opportunist, but really what’s new about that…
On the other hand, I am much more concerned by the deliberate photoshopped images of Barak Obama printed on unsolicited Republican flyers that engulfed my mailbox before the election. Who were the photographers of those maliciously altered portraits? Who’s suing about that?
As with the ACLU, I’m looking at the big picture. The specifics of Fairey have been illuminated by Vallen and I concur.

Odd that AP waited until after the presidential campaign to act.

Also odd that the Boston PD waited until after the “graffit” act to pounce.

Seems like more than one someone’s trying to rub off a little Fairey dust on themselves.