Shepard Fairey, the artist recognized for creating the Hope poster associated with President Obama’s campaign, took accountability for lying about the photograph on which he based the reproduced image. The confession, made known to the public on Friday, finally came up after months of fighting lawsuit charges from the Associated Press.
The New York Times reported the following:
Mr. Fairey admitted that in the initial months after the suit and countersuit were filed, he destroyed evidence and created false documents to cover up the real source. He said he had initially believed that The A.P was wrong about which photo he used, but later realized the agency was right.
“In an attempt to conceal my mistake, I submitted false images and deleted other images,” Mr. Fairey said in a statement, released on his Web site. “I sincerely apologize for my lapse in judgment, and I take full responsibility for my actions, which were mine alone.”
Mr. Fairey’s lawyers said they intended to withdraw when he could find new counsel.
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2 years ago | Tags: obama, New York Times, contemporary art Sheperd Fairey copyright laws
It turns out that my mention of Sheperd Fairey (but, really, who hasn’t been thinking about this man a lot lately) was very timely. The New York Times published an interesting story about the “street artist” just a day or two ago. The article (of which I’ve reproduced in part below) goes on to talk about the normalization of what was originally a counter-culture measure in the 1970s and continues to be in part. But really, how counter-culture can you be with your work in one of the foremost museums in the world: the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.? I think this concept of “counter-culture” is perhaps going by the wayside or is it just that street art may no longer have this claim. Maybe this is the start of new boundaries (just as street art was breaking boundaries 30 and 40 years ago)? New artistic definitions? Does this say more about the museums embracing street artists or about such an anti-establishment group of artists embracing museums? What do you think?
“In 2005, the British artist Banksy — then on the verge of becoming probably the world’s most famous street artist — walked into the Museum of Modern Art and three other New York museums done up in a beige raincoat and fake beard, looking more like a subway flasher than a “quality vandal,” as he called himself. Once inside he furtively mounted his own work among the masterpieces, relying on speed and two-sided tape rather than curatorial consent as his way into the collections, at least until guards noticed….
But as it turns out, there is more than one way into a museum for street art, the catchall term now used to describe a global explosion of public imagery that began with graffiti in the 1970s and has morphed into dozens of wildly different forms, generally united only by their illegal exhibition on public and private property. On Tuesday, asBarack Obama was being sworn into office, his portrait by the street artist Shepard Fairey — reproduced endlessly during the campaign until it became the defining image of the future president (it towered over a stage at one of the inaugural balls) — was on view at the National Portrait Gallery. A collaged poster of it had just entered the collection along with portraits by artists like Gilbert Stuart (George Washington), Norman Rockwell(Richard Nixon) and Elaine de Kooning (John Kennedy).”
3 years ago | Tags: art, street art New York Times Banksy Sheperd Fairey Obama-mania National Portrait Gallery counterculture
