This a-hole has a posse.
The Times today has an interesting piece on the new breed of low-print-run, high-gloss lifestyle magazines. The focus is Swindle, a relatively new mag that is apparently re-inventing the idea of the zine for Generation Y. (It also mentions, Lemon, a magazine which apparently is SCENTED).
About 3/4 of the way in, the piece quotes Shepard Fairey, who's one of the two creators of Swindle. They call him a "36-year-old street artist turned marketing guru." He's better known to the world as the creator of Obey and those stickers and wheatpastes that say, "Andre the Giant Has A Posse."
When I first started seeing the posters in San Francisco, maybe ten years ago, there was a captivating mystery to them. When I learned more about Fairey, I was doubley captivated... the wheatpastes were intended as a sort of satire of consumer culture, an advertisement for a product which didn't exist... agitprop for a nonexistent ideology.
Of course, since those posters became a phenomenon, Fairey has basically pooped upon his original idea by making his "Obey Giant" brand into just that -- a brand.
I'm not one to accuse people of selling out -- I know we all have to make a living, and I would have had no problem with Fairey using his aesthetic skill and renown to teach big companies to be cool or whatever. But what he did really took selling out to a new level.
And then I read this article, and read quotes like this:
No amount of ironic magazine naming can wash out that stain.
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About 3/4 of the way in, the piece quotes Shepard Fairey, who's one of the two creators of Swindle. They call him a "36-year-old street artist turned marketing guru." He's better known to the world as the creator of Obey and those stickers and wheatpastes that say, "Andre the Giant Has A Posse."
When I first started seeing the posters in San Francisco, maybe ten years ago, there was a captivating mystery to them. When I learned more about Fairey, I was doubley captivated... the wheatpastes were intended as a sort of satire of consumer culture, an advertisement for a product which didn't exist... agitprop for a nonexistent ideology.
Of course, since those posters became a phenomenon, Fairey has basically pooped upon his original idea by making his "Obey Giant" brand into just that -- a brand.
I'm not one to accuse people of selling out -- I know we all have to make a living, and I would have had no problem with Fairey using his aesthetic skill and renown to teach big companies to be cool or whatever. But what he did really took selling out to a new level.
And then I read this article, and read quotes like this:
Barf city, right?"We want the advertising to sort of blend with the content," Mr. Fairey said on the phone from his Los Angeles marketing firm, Studio One, which counts 20th Century Fox and Coca-Cola as clients. "When there's an ad that doesn't seem simpatico, we think it messes up the feng shui of the magazine."
No amount of ironic magazine naming can wash out that stain.
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posted by Jesse Thorn at Monday, May 08, 2006
5 Comments:
Obey makes some killer T-shirts though!
As someone who has followed Shepards career since the beginning ( in Providence, RI ), I can say that he is not selling out. To sell out you have to have something to sell besides some vaguely parroted concepts that are fed to you by reviewers. He never used the ubiquity of his images to challenge anything. Everyone has to make a living, but you can maybe take a little less cash and have some integrity.
Nah, this is a bunch of poop. Trust me. He clearly has his head up his kring krong.
I'm conflicted on this. I mean yeah he has "sold his idea", so does that mean he's "selling out?"
I mean we all have to wear shirts, why not buy a shirt that has an anti-consumerism subtext? It seems more palatable than buying non-printed organic cotton shirts as a statement.
Selling the shirts allows people who admire and believe in his concept and message to wear the shirt and proclaim agreement with the concept.
Not saying this is necessarily the case, but maybe that it's a necessary evil.
The only time I've met Fairey, here in Chicago where I live, was right after the first serious money he had made from his work; he had just finished a guerrilla ad campaign, in fact, for the Andy Kaufmann biopic "Man In the Moon," and was using the profits to fund his first-ever national tour for his fine-art work. At least at the time (mid-'90s), Fairey was very excited about the development, and talked at length about how such traditional lessons in advertising and branding could be used to fund underground artistic projects, using just a small selection of very popular items to fuel an entire community of artists who would otherwise not be commercially viable. What you've mentioned in this entry is troubling, to be sure; but based on that conversation I had with Fairey, I'm willing to give him at least the benefit of a doubt for now, until finding out more about what the profits from these projects are actually used for. Hmm, maybe it's time for a little TSOYA investigative work!
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