ThePumpkins.net

Did you know Shepard Fairy, who also did the artwork for Zeitgeist and merchandise from the 2007 tour, also did this Obama poster? I thought that was interesting, since this poster has become so recognizable. Very intresting....

www.smashingpumpkins.com/pages/news/zeit...nal-portrait-gallery

i didn't realize the connection until HU had something about it actually. its a cool poster.

did you read his quote about it?
sounds exactly the same as what Billy said on that "The Hour" interview.

“I’m a populist,” Mr. Fairey said in an interview with a portrait gallery curator. “I’m trying to reach as many people as possible.”

“I love the concept in fine art of making a masterpiece, something that will endure,” he said, adding that he understood, too, how unlikely that is for anyone. “But I also understand how short the attention span of most consumers is and that you really need to work with the metabolism of consumer culture a lot of the time to make something relevant within the zeitgeist.”

hipstersunited.com/blog/

That poster is really cool. I've never really taken a close look at it, and I like the blemishes and designs in the red.

That poster has made Mr. Fairey a very rich man, hehe. He's a cool dude, though. Met him last year at his art instillation. My pal and I asked about his SP artwork and, uh, he found Billy to be an arse who wouldn't relinquish reproduction rights to the album artwork.

he seems really cool. i watched him on the colbert report a few weeks back, but i didn't know that he did the artwork for zeitgeist!

Trillian wrote:
Given that he regularly "appropriates" existing art without giving credit where credit is due, I have very little sympathy for him.

Aw jeez:

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090204/ap_en_ot/obama_poster

I framed this for someone recently at my job as a custom framer.

Ugly Joe wrote:
I wholeheartedly agree.

check this out

www.thebostonchannel.com/news/18662913/detail.html

crazy, I saw that earlier.

melabonbon wrote:
Unfortunately, a widespread and baseless internet campaign to smear Shepard Fairey has been going on for some time now. It primarily revolves around a widely circulated article by artist Mark Vallen, whose evident distaste for Shepard’s work—and obvious lack of modern art world knowledge—led him to jump to a handful of hollow conclusions questioning the originality legitimacy of Fairey’s art...

In his piece, Vallen defines plagiarism as “the deliberate passing off of someone else’s work as your own,” and claims that the difference between Fairey and Lichtenstein is that the latter never laid claim to Mickey Mouse, while Shepard tries to deceitfully sneak his appropriations past viewers in broad daylight. Of course, that couldn’t be further from the truth (the Shepard part, that is). If Vallen had bothered to open “Supply and Demand,” Shepard’s career retrospective book released more than a year and a half before Vallen published his article on his site, he would have seen many of Fairey’s images reproduced side-by-side with the originals that were appropriated or referenced. Clearly there’s no basis to Vallen’s claim that Shepard “filches artworks and hopes no one notices,” when the artist himself is publishing evidence of his appropriation—with accompanying text explaining his process and rationale—and distributing it openly around the world.

Under fair use the general public should know this information off hand from their collective knowledge of contemporary society. In other words, they should know without having to buy a book in order to know. The public should be able to look at ‘Cuban Rider’ and say, “Fairey is commenting on the Rene Mederos poster!”. Unfortunately, Shepard Fairey has failed on that crucial aspect of fair use-- which is why it seems that he attempts to pass works by others off as his own. In that sense, Supply and Demand and the current limited edition of the book is nothing more than a way for Shepard Fairey to defend his work by saying, “See, I made everything clear in this book!” while slapping a price tag upon said knowledge. That is exactly what Mark Vallen's critique of Shepard Fairey is about.

(A couple pieces debating Fairey's work...)

Interesting debates there! However, after seeing the comparisons between the Obama photo and his version, there is no denying that he used the same image.