The Right's Shepard Fairey
[Link: www.salon.com...]
Jon McNaughton’s painting of Obama trampling the Constitution has made him conservatives’ favorite new artist
For many progressives, Shepard Fairey’s HOPE poster now evokes the same riot of emotions that comes from picking through photos of a friend taken before an epic falling-out or of parents before a divorce: regret, anger, queasy self-consciousness, a stray pang of old joy.
But, in its day, the tri-color masterpiece of Barack Obama did its work magnificently. Fairey’s genius innovation was to flavor hearty, comfort-food nationalism with a bright dash of counterculture. His aesthetic, a May-December marriage of social realism and post-millennial stencil graffiti, borrowed from the protest art of two generations. In cribbing the signifiers of rebellion, the screen-painted image exalted a simple wish for a better tomorrow to the level of a radical act — all while making the slyest wink at the inescapable ridiculousness of campaign posters. And, of course, in Obama’s abstract, almost Fauvist face, progressives saw not just their candidate, but themselves: youthful, noble, sophisticated, iconoclastic, and superlatively patriotic. The man was modern.
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Frank says: