Obey The Irony

There is this guy who has a makeshift store set up around the corner from my place. He has some bootleg t-shirts hanging from a tree and laid out on his car outside of a bank. The t-shirts are all Obama themed…he’s got the Time Magazine cover, the Rolling Stone cover, and the famous “Change” poster done up with rasta colors. Every time i walk by he’s selling shirts and making some quick cash…and this kind of thing is really pissing off Mr. Obey Giant himself. The re-appropriator du jour, Shepard Fairey.

I have a love/hate relationship with the work of Shepard Fairey. I totally respect and admire his ability as an artist to have a very prolific and profitable career doing what he wants to do. He makes some great looking graphic art. Its provacative and arresting. I love the limited color pallette (although it would be nice to see him take a bigger risk with color instead of relying on the safe), i love the humor and the zingers. He’s got street cred, he’s got some pretty sweet corporate clients….He’s living the dream on his own terms. 

But i also hate how he has a very documented history of ripping off imagery, concepts and ideas from other artists. The plagarism accusation has been going around the internet for some time, and he even admits to it in some interviews. Its not stealing, its just borrowing right? Yeah until someone does it to you. So I found it incredibly ironic that he is now publicly complaining that people are “stealing” his famous Obama “change/progress” posters and making money off of his work. From a recent  piece on NPR *…

“An image of Barack Obama by artist Shepard Fairey has become one of the most popular images of the campaign. But Fairey, whose posters have helped raise money for the campaign, says he has little patience for people who have copied the image for personal profit or resold his posters — at huge markups — on eBay.”

The irony lies in here we have an artist who’s made a career out of borrowing or re-appropriating art and calling it his own. All the while he turns this stuff into a global brand and makes serious money off of it, but now is beginning to understand what it means to have your work stolen. 

This speaks to a larger generational issue. If you’re under 25 you most probabally spend alot of time on the internet and you probabally don’t think its wrong to trade files on p2p networks like bitorrent. Read around on sites like Digg or Torrentfreak you’ll see that there is a prevailing hive mentality that is scary. This idea that is common around internet savy teens and 20 somethings is they believe that copyright is evil and everything should be shared and open sourced. They’ve fallen head over heels in love with the creative commons license that Flickr has popularized and decided that it applies to all intellectual property regardless of what the author wishes. Its an incrediblely entitled point of view that thinks that people have the right to tell artists how their work should be used and how they are allowed to make money off of it, but they honestly believe that intellectual property is “make believe” and should have no protection. To them copyright is nothing more than corporate greed that prevents information from being free. From what i’ve read, its ok to steal an image and use it for profit as long as you “give credit” and even thats being generous. In short, if it can manifest itself into a digital form its free. Doesn’t matter if its a photograph, CD, TV show, movie, text book, video game…its all data, its all free. This is an incredibly dangerous perspective that is spreading like wildfire through the internet and really threatens all artists ability to control their own work and how they make a living.

Shepard Fairey (and Banksy) is like a patron saint to this whole subculture. He started off as graf/wheat paste artist, scaling fences and putting up his posters and stickers on other people’s property. Some say he was at the forefront of a revolution but he was really just building a brand. Yeah he got arrested for it, but he also got rich and famous off of it. Gallery shows, books, a clothing line, publishing of a magazine and some really nice high end design jobs later he’s ultimate hero for this entitled generation that believes everything is free for the taking.

This forced open source hive mentality would have no problem with finding an illustration, painting or photograph, live tracing it and putting it on a poster that you sell on your site for profit. And thats exactly what Shepard Fairey had built a career and brand out of. And thats exactly what that guy with his t-shirts hanging from the trees outside of my bank is doing. He’s not doing anything wrong by Fairey’s own standards so there is a bit of irony in this whole situation. In the Pandora’s box that is the internet anything can become viral in a matter of minutes. If you choose to live by that sword you have to also face the consequences that you’ll get ripped off once in a while. 

And lastly because curiousity begs that I ask. Y’know that news photograph of Obama that you found on google images and traced for your poster?  What was the name of the photographer who’s work you borrowed? A serious question i’d love the answer to. 

 

* the story was run on NPR but i found out about it through my daily blog rounds. Saw the first link on designotes which had a link to a story on unbeige which linked to the NPR story…yeah the internet is funny like that.