To the Editors:

Brian Gallagher's Shepard Fairey piece is timely and relevant. When Fairey was arrested in Boston the other day, the first reaction of some people I talked with about it was that his arrest was a stunt Fairey somehow engineered to generate publicity for his career-retrospective show at the ICA in that art-unfriendly city. It wasn't, but thinking that shows how people don't trust Fairey's motives.

Certainly his arrest adds to his credibility as a street artist engaged in a radical art practice, as does the countersuit Fairey has filed against the Associated Press regarding his Obama "HOPE" poster. The issues of fair use and bogus claims of copyright infringement are important ones we should confront. Gallagher points out that so much of Fairey's work owes its inspiration to the work of the Russian constructivists and to images of various political figures seen in propaganda posters. But there is a more basic source for Fairey's art, at once more obvious and more hidden: John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi movie They Live. Read More

In a move that surprised exactly no one, Time magazine recently chose for its "Person of the Year" Barack Obama. Likely sensing that bust-size photos of Obama gazing hopefully into an indeterminate distance were just about kaput as aesthetic capital, the Time editors decided to go the cool route. Richard Stengel wrote: "Our cover portrait is by the street artist Shepard Fairey, whose roots are in the skateboarding world and whose early poster of then Senator Obama became the great populist image of the campaign. With this cover, Fairey has now created a new iconic image of the President-elect—a rich, multilayered poster that echoes but then expands on his original." The cover of Time represents a sort of closing of the circle for Fairey, whose ubiquitous Obama poster, adorned with the word "Hope," shot his style to new heights of recognizability, while galvanizing a particular image and notion of the candidate in the American consciousness. It's not hard to see that in this partnership each side is conferred abstract benefits. Time gets the "edgy" aesthetic value of Fairey's work, and Fairey gets the validation and exposure provided by Time's circulation. (In other words, the cover is the Audi A8 from Transporter 3.) Read More