Shepard Fairey

OBEY Apparel Ltd.

I spotted this hat on the #1 bus the other day and though I don’t want to become a ranting Shepard Fairey hater, I felt I should at least draw some attention to his clothing line. The AP, in a recent amendment to their case, is now counting OBEY Clothing as a defendant in the suit. Now, I thought only long-dead artists could profit off of apparel sales, and even then it’s typically the tote bags and umbrellas sold in museum gift shops, but Fairey seems better able to capitalize on his pictures than probably any other artist in history, at least among those respected enough to get solo retrospectives at major institutions. To think Warhol was controversial for ‘mass producing’ prints from the same screens, or having assistants do it for him–this actually still raises problems of authentication in the Warhol marketplace.

This website does an excellent job of identifying appropriations made by Fairey that are far more arcane than the AP Obama photograph in question and well traces the Fairey controvers(y/ies).

Left: Still from Michael Anderson’s 1956 adaptation of "1984." Right: Fairey's poster.

Left: Still from Michael Anderson’s 1956 adaptation of "1984." Right: Fairey's poster.

Artists from Picasso to Duchamp to Warhol have employed appropriated images and objects in artwork, but it’s never been a serious issue, or at least one tackled by copyright courts, because artists don’t typically profit off trademarked images, like those that appear on t-shirts and sweatshirts. Artists usually seek notoriety, commissions, and the sale of original art objects. Obey Clothing may have started with just hip t-shirts, but Fairey is now branding jeans, dresses, and jackets that don’t even incorporate Fairey or Fairey-like (fey?) imagery. They’re typical of the urban-hip garb sold in the causal departments of mid-range department stores.

It’s become hackneyed to say someone has sold-out, but does an artist retain his artistic license when he (or whomever is sending him checks) is acting under a business model rather than an artistic one? I don’t think so. Shouldn’t he be held to the same legal standards to which we hold the corporate world? He defends himself with fair use, a defence (not a right) handled on a case by case basis and not helped if you’re selling products or not engaging in explicit parody.

I don’t really dig on ‘political art,’ because it usually results in a transitory one-liner that rarely transgresses the forms of the advertisement, propaganda poster, or political cartoon. I do dig appropriated imagery, provided the act of appropriation has significance, and the blurring of boundaries between art and design, poster and painting, and maybe even gallery and retail space. But it seems Fairey has and continues to do everything possible to discredit himself and his work. The ICA show, now at the Pittsburgh Warhol Museum, may boost attendance for these institutions, but the museums risk discrediting themselves with Fairey’s increasing tainted political ‘message’ on corporate culture–something he seems no more adverse to than Mary-Kate and Ashley. I keep looking for meaning in his commercial participation to back up the pop-radical message of his stuff and words, but I just don’t see it. I’d probably like him more if he had the affected shallowness and apathy of Warhol.

I wonder if Obama is kicking himself?

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (and Copyright)

I suppose I’m responding here more to activity in the local blogosphere (see Joel Brown and Thomas Garvey), than I am to the ongoing news of Shepard Fairey versus the AP and his recent statement that he knowingly falsified evidence, because I follow those blogs more closely than Shepard Fairey news and my problem with his work isn’t unoriginal images, but rather unoriginal ideas.

warhol-flowersDuring the Fairey exhibition, I felt Fairey was, albeit between the lines, inappropriately billed as some kind of new Warhol. Can you imagine Warhol reacting like Fairey did to this lawsuit? like a teenager getting caught with a bag of pot or someone who’s being sued by the RIAA for downloading the latest Godsmack album. Warhol was sued in 1966 by Patricia Caulfield, who took the picture he used for his Flowers (right). He ended up settling out of court, giving her a couple paintings and royalties on his profits (or cash and paintings or just money, depending on where you read about it). I can imagine Warhol replying to some of the questions Fairey has been asked with “God, but I love the AP, they can have the picture back” or “But, it’s just so much easier to get pictures from Google.” I actually don’t think Fairey was in the wrong by using the image (at least I hope not, because I steal pictures all the time for this blog), but he certainly is now for falsifying evidence, countersuing the AP, and threatening other artists for appropriating his work.

While certainly a comparison can be drawn in terms of their modes of appropriation, Fairey falls far short of Warhol in terms of the depth of that appropriation, though he is considerably more garrulous. I think a simple juxtaposition illustrates how different they are; mainly, how great Warhol was and how silly Fairey can be. Below are Fairey’s apology and the first few seconds of the excellent Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film.

STATEMENT ON ASSOCIATED PRESS FAIR USE CASE

In an effort to keep everyone up to date on my legal battle to uphold the principle of fair use in copyright laws, I wanted to notify you of a recent development in my case against The Associated Press (AP).

On October 9, 2009, my lawyers sent a letter to the AP and to the photographer Mannie Garcia, through their lawyers, notifying them that I intend to amend my court pleadings. Throughout the case, there has been a question as to which Mannie Garcia photo I used as a reference to design the HOPE image. The AP claimed it was one photo, and I claimed it was another.

The new filings state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong.

In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images. I sincerely apologize for my lapse in judgment and I take full responsibility for my actions which were mine alone. I am taking every step to correct the information and I regret I did not come forward sooner.

I am very sorry to have hurt and disappointed colleagues, friends, and family who have supported me in this difficult case and trying time in my life.

I am also sorry because my actions may distract from what should be the real focus of my case – the right to fair use so that all artists can create freely. Regardless of which of the two images was used, the fair use issue should be the same.

- Shepard

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ICA, Do It Your Way

After seeing the Shepard Fairey exhibition at the ICA and witnessing all the hype drummed up by Fairey’s ‘arrest,’ I’ve felt that the museum, as an institution, has this very tangible presence in what it puts on. When you go see the Titians, or whatever, at the MFA you don’t get a sense of the MFA as an institution with an agenda and a marketing strategy. But, the ICA’s arms and hands seem to be right out in the open. Maybe this is because Renaissance art, for example, sells itself with big name artists, loans from big name museums, and high-value works, while contemporary art doesn’t. To get people to pony up the $15 admission to the relatively small museum to see an artist they’ve probably never heard of before takes a marketing miracle every time an exhibition comes to town.

To me, the success of an ICA exhibition, now that most interested New Englanders have seen the place at least once, comes down to that one picture that saturates the local media in advertising and reviews, serving as a single frame trailer to the entire exhibition. With Fairey, we of course had the Obama OBEY poster, and now although Obama’s countenance is a tough act to follow, we have the dismantled VW Beetle Cosmic Thing.

Contemporary art is a really tough sell. It doesn’t benefit from a popular cannon of famous artists or pictures of inordinately high value. Instead, to most, it’s obscure, inaccessible, and well removed from any kind if popular aesthetic. It engenders reactions like, well, I could do that, and questions of its aesthetic worth, price tag, and place in a museum. When I visit the ICA, there’s always a crowd around the TV in the mediatheque, while the iMacs remain unoccupied except for tour groups and bored children, of people seeking meaning in the looped videos the ICA assembles and produces. I don’t think the ICA anticipated the popularity of that space, or they would have replaced the computers with benches facing a larger screen.

Elote_clasificadoMost visitors require some sort of justification of the exhibition’s status as art and video provides that, as well as some level of meaning and analysis and it serves to authenticate, by showing on a screen, whatever is occupying the gallery space.  It’s also simply something to do, a way to occupy a block of time, because if you’re not really that interested, you could probably see Damián Ortega: Do It Yourself in about 15 minutes. It’s only 19 works. Many patrons need to justify their $15 and trek down to Courthouse Station. A quick stroll around a relatively small gallery space doesn’t do that, at least for tourists and locals used to the MFA. Of course keeping people in isn’t really the ICA’s problem, it’s getting them there. A contemporary art somebody doesn’t bring in crowds. It takes an image powerful enough to, though media saturation and local ubiquity, become iconic. Is Ortega’s Elote clasificado (2005, right) eye-catching enough to hook Web browsers or Globe and Phoenix readers? I don’t think so. But Cosmic Thing (2002, below) certainly is.

Ortega's 'Cosmic Thing' (Melissa Ostrow for The Phoenix) and an example of the technical assembly diagrams it recalls

Ortega's 'Cosmic Thing' (Melissa Ostrow for The Phoenix) and an example of the technical assembly diagrams it recalls

Curator Jessica Morgan speaks on ‘Cosmic Thing’

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The Bug is iconic in America. We’re drawn to the cars even when fully assembled. When one’s strung up like this, I don’t think we can resist. Cosmic Thing doesn’t even seem foreign, it looks American and it’s as hip and aesthetically sensible as the Obama OBEY poster. The thing could be an advertisement for Volkswagen. In fact, similar stuff was. VW was years ahead of its time and famously off-beat in its advertising. Have a look at some of the old Beetle ads below and see Roy’s VW Ad Archive for more. See a resemblance? They remind me not only of Cosmic Thing itself, but also the press and advertisements for the exhibition.

Beetle Ads from the 1960s

Beetle ads from the 1960s

Now, the power Cosmic Thing‘s image in ICA marketing campaigns shouldn’t detract from its power as art. Plenty of canonical American art relies entirely on popular icons; Warhol, Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman’s Complete Untitled Film Stills. Cosmic Thing (and the Bug) are actually iconic for very different reasons in Mexico. First, the car is still widely in use, and second, as we hear from Jessica Morgan’s commentary, most Mexican Beetle’s are assembled from junk yard parts, very much in the DIY spirit. Cosmic Thing becomes a sculptural assembly manual, an illustrated diagram translated into a 3-dimensional gallery space, so that one may walk amongst the parts ‘pictured.’ Other than being visually arresting without any context and as cool to look at as a good VW ad, that’s what Cosmic Thing does for me. I’m sure IKEA would be interested in commissioning a few sculptures.

skin Do It Yourself is unfortunately weighed down by the metaphors we’re expected to see and the mealy-mouthed critical rhetoric used to describe them in the the audio commentary and wall-text. Authoritative talk of deconstructed systems, the dynamism of the everyday, and subversion through the ephemeral, doesn’t really ring as true as one would expect. The art isn’t as conceptual as it would like to be. References to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom seem superficially applied, and like the captions of New Yorker cartoons we just don’t get. As has been widely discussed, Orterga’s previous occupation was as a political cartoonist and I think it’s due to this that some of the work breaks the rule they teach you on the first day of art school: don’t make one-liner art. For example, Skin (2007, right). Here Ortega hired a saddle maker to emboss the blueprints of three modernist apartment complexes on leather. The plans hang fragmented from the ceiling in strips. OK, utopian modernist housing goes flop, I get it. Or, False Movement (Stability and Economic Growth) (1999) precariously stacks 3 rusty oil drums atop a spinning platform. If only we had only seen this one last September!

A highlight of the exhibition is 120 Days (2002, below). I think it’s best viewed sans the Marquis de Sade reference. Going off of the feminine form of the Coca-Cola bottle, he had Italian glass blowers distort the familiar basic bottle shape into all sorts of positions that are meant to resemble Marquis de Sade-esque sexual positions, while at the same time contrast artisan glass blowing with mass production and celebrate the diversity of the female figure. I was struck by some of the bottles’ resemblance to the reproductive organs of flowers. I thought of some of the more rudimentary glass flower models at The Harvard Museum of Natural History.

'120 Days' (2002) and a flower diagram

'120 Days' (2002) and a flower diagram

I would still recommend everyone go. You have until January 18th and it’s certainly better than seeing Harry Potter props at the Museum of Science. It is one of the few big exhibitions of the year, and that’s probably why so many, including myself, are hard on it. But, unless you’re an ICA member or college student that receives free admission, I might think about going on Target’s dime some Thursday evening. Because, when one visits a museum, he really shouldn’t feel obligated to get his money’s worth.