[BretLudwig]

Obey Giant Obama

"A reader writes about Obama's popular Soviet constructivist-style
propaganda poster:

Here is the official poster sold at the Obama campaign website:

It's sold out of its limited edition of 5,000 at $70 apiece.

The artist who created this image is Shepard Fairey.

Apparently, that's his real name.

As Time Magazine puts it, SF is "The man who launched the sticker
revolution."

Previously people who did "graffiti art," like Warhol find Jean-Michel
Basquiat, spray painted buildings. Even if they did the same image over and
over again, each spray painting was unique. Fairey hit on the idea of
pre-printing his vandalism as stickers and then covering an urban area
with the endless repetition of the same image.

The first idea Fairey had was a sticker of the late professional
wrestler Andre the Giant:

AndreTheGiantSticker.jpg

In Fairey's mind, Andre the Giant gets mixed up with Big Brother,
since Andrea, is, well, big. This produces Fairey's next sticker campaign:
"Obey Giant:"

LARGE SIZED STICKER

Hitting upon Soviet aesthetics, Fairey became a big hit with those who
wax nostalgic for the return of the USSR. He founded BLK/MRKT Visual
Communications to sell his rebel hipness to Hawaiian Punch. Here's one of
Fairey's various Lenin/Stalin posters:


The art side is run out of http://obeygiant.com ...

Here are some examples of that work:

http://obeygiant.com/archives?nggpage=7

http://mkgallery.com/artists/fairey/fairey_2006_3.html
Of course God reminds us not to value this life to too highly by
allowing it to endlessly descend to lower and lower levels of self parody.
Thus it came to pass, my comrade, that when Penguin Books was getting
around to reissue the Orwell "backlist," they picked Fairey to do the
covers for "1984" and "Animal Farm" ... i.e., a guy who thinks Stalin was
cool will now insert himself into the history of these texts:


http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com/th...-a-bright.html

Animalfarm_afrmt_2

Here is the NYT article that prompted this all:

What does it all mean? Obviously, the Obey Obama the Giant poster isn't
"ironic." Humorless credulity, not irony, is the hallmark of Obama fans.

Instead, the Obey Obama poster just shows once again what Michael Blowhard
and Shouting Thomas pointed out recently: Most artists aren't very smart.
They like shiny stuff:

"There was a stretch in the '90s when edgy theater artists were
showcasing garish colors, laughtracks, snappy pacing, game-show formats
and such. The critics were treating themselves to a field day explaining
that what these deep, complex, and (as always) "critical" artists were up
to was subverting our media-drenched assumptions with their media-based
strategies. Vanessa, who actually hung out with a number of these actors
and directors, laughed and said to me, "What nonsense. These kids are
creating theater pieces that resemble live versions of television because
TV is what they really like. They like TV, and they want the theater they
create to be like TV.""

So, all these Obama fans are buying posters done in the style of Soviet
propaganda posters because ... because they think they look cool. Which
explains a lot about their politics, too."

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/04/hello-mr.html

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