Who Designed Obama’s Posters? A Stalin-Loving Propagandist
Obey Obama the Giant
A reader writes about Obama’s popular Soviet constructivist-style propaganda poster:
Here is the official poster sold at the Obama campaign website:
Sadly, 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 Andre the Giant:
In Fairey’s mind, Andrea the Giant gets mixed up with Big Brother, since Andrea, is, well, big. This produces Fairey’s next sticker campaign: “Obey Andre:”
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:
The art side is run out of obeygiant.com …
Here are some examples of that work:
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. This 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:
Here is the NYT article that prompted this all:
What does it all mean? Well, pretty much what Michael Blowhard and S