OBEY courtesy obeygiant.com
It’s been a big year for Shepard Fairey: From street-art legend and hipster darling to household name, subject of a museum retrospective and lately the center of a legal squabble over artistic ownership and originality. Last Thursday, he sat down with legendary legal scholar and fair-use activist Lawrence Lessig for a talk at the New York Public Library, which if you think of it was the perfect venue for a discussion of the benefits of freely sharing culture’s riches (that is, if you overlook the event’s $25 entry fee).
Fairey gave the audience a quick tour through his artistic development to the end of elucidating the players in the current controversy. His notoriety began with what was an inside joke among his RISD pals—a sticker with the phrase “Andre the Giant Has a Posse.” The now iconic symbol went viral, showing up on lampposts around the world. The pro-wrestler icon was then configured using a graphic, social-realist style to convey a big-brother-is-watching-you menace reinforced by the tag line “Obey.” This led to more pointed agitprop critical of President Bush, the Iraq War, etc. Then, in a fit of inspiration one day in January 2008, he created what would become the signature image of the Obama campaign. Starting with an “unspectacular, unexceptional” Associated Press photo he found on the Internet, he made an image of optimism (“Obey” became “Hope”). The candidate’s face was transformed into an icon of red, white and blue, conveying patriotism, bipartisanship and a post-racial politics. This grassroots creation caught the zeitgeist, appearing on T-shirts and MySpace pages everywhere, and a version even appearing even on the cover of Time magazine and in the National Portrait Gallery. A full year after he first made the image, the Associated Press now says Fairey owes them. The artist disagrees, arguing that his poster significantly differs from its source. Not only that, he says, but it has added value to their photo. He is prepared to state his case in court, saying, “This something I need to fight for the sake of artists in general, not just for me.”
Fairey wasn’t doing anything new. And any number of Obama photos would have worked just as well, a point Lessig illustrated by showing ten or so other very similar looking Obamas. In fact, Fairey used several source photos and made several versions. The Time magazine cover differs from the original “Hope” image. Moreover, anyone with an Internet connection can make their own. Try it yourself.
Is it possible to be original in art? The question was posed by none other than DJ Spooky in the Q&A. Fairey’s answer: If being original means resorting to stunts like dumping paint inside a jet engine to spray it on a canvas then “let’s just not be original.”
Another question on everyone’s minds was where Fairey draws the line. Would he mind if someone plagiarized his work? Unsurprisingly, Fairey and Lessig believe intellectual property has its place and not all culture should be free. A guy’s got to make a living, right? For Fairey, it’s not so much in how close the image is to its original, but rather how it is used. As it happened, he was compelled to shut down what he described as a bootlegger of his Obama image. Giveaway buttons and blog posts, no problem, but “one guy we knew had bragged about buying a Mercedes from the profits of bootleg posters. And we were like, you know what, the ACLU [one organization Fairey had donated his proceeds to] might really need a Mercedes.”—Tim Paul
Photograph courtesy Melissa Soltis
