Words. For Your Consideration...
"The jig is finally up. Shepard Fairey, an Echo Park-based graphic designer and longtime street artist, admitted earlier this month that he submitted false evidence and lied in a copyright lawsuit involving his most famous creation: the "Hope" poster featuring a stark red-white-and-blue image of Barack Obama.
The Associated Press had always maintained that Fairey created the image by essentially tracing over a close-up photograph of Obama taken by an AP contract photographer, Mannie Garcia, in 2006. Fairey insisted that he had used a smaller, cropped portion of another Garcia photo and that he was entitled to do so under the principle of "fair use."
On Feb. 9, Fairey filed a lawsuit seeking a declaration from the court that he hadn't violated any copyright in the creation of his work. The suit was an effort to forestall a copyright-infringement lawsuit by the AP. But on the very day the lawsuit was filed, Daryl Lang, an editor at Photo District News, posted a Photoshop overlay of the image of Obama captured on Fairey's "Hope" poster and the close-up that the AP maintained he used. The two images matched point for point.
Lang's overlay put the lie to Fairey's claim, but it took the artist months to concede that he had used, as the AP had maintained from the beginning, the close-up. Even now, he insists that expropriating the image was "fair use."
So why wasn't the jig up as soon as Lang posted his evidence? Because Fairey was "one of us" in the eyes of the fiercely liberal cultural and intellectual elite.
...Fairey has built his artistic career on a combination of vandalism, via graffiti-like hit-and-run art, and an expropriation of other people's images. While he insists he uses the art of others only as "reference points," his critics have termed his work outright plagiarism.
...Fairey boasts of having been arrested 15 times on graffiti charges in various cities. He pleaded guilty in Boston earlier this year to three counts of vandalism, including affixing a sticker to a traffic sign and putting a poster on a condominium building of his wife holding a gun.
...At 39, Fairey may seem a bit old for such merry pranks, but you have to remember that armchair Marxist intellectuals and others of Fairey's ilk still look back with longing to the grimy 1970s and 1980s in New York, when graffiti blanketed every car in the subway system. They were appalled by the successful efforts of mayors Ed Koch and Rudolph Giuliani to crack down on the taggers in order to make the city livable for the philistines who had to take the trains to work.
Even some of Fairey's fellow leftists in the arts community have objected to his free-handed lifting -- without attribution -- of images created by others, even though many of those images are likely in the public domain."
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