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Here’s another goodie regarding Obama’s main propaganda “Hope” poster creator:

“Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey”

“Most well known for his “Obey Giant” street posters, Shepard Fairey has carefully nurtured a reputation as a heroic guerilla street artist waging a one man campaign against the corporate powers-that-be. Infantile posturing aside, Fairey’s art is problematic for another, more troubling reason - that of plagiarism.

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 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.

[ Left: Still from director 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.

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 unique personal style. His imagery appears as though it’s xeroxed or run through some computer graphics program; that is to say, it is machine art 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 commercial imagery, displayed passages of gestural drawing and flamboyant brushstrokes.

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 imagery, but one was always aware that Lichtenstein was taking his images from comic books; that was after all the point, to examine the blasé and artificial in modern American commercial culture. When Lichtenstein painted Look Mickey, a 1961 oil on canvas portrait of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, everyone was cognizant of the artist’s source material - they were in on the joke. By contrast, Fairey simply filches artworks and hopes that no one notices - the joke is on you...”

“Shepard Fairey Accused of Plagiarism — Again”

http://providencedailydose.com/2009/10/18/shepard-fairey-accused-of-plagiarism-again/

“UPDATE: This week Fairey admitted to lying about which photo was the basis for the Obama poster...”

(snip)”As much as we hate pooping on other once-Rhode-Islanders, this appears to be just one of Fairey’s many (typically unattributed) appropriations of others’ work, for profit. This website makes a pretty damning case that swiping others’ work is endemic to Fairey’s art. And an equally strong case that his work has become void of meaning — a purposeless branding of his own name, and the “Obey Posse’s.””