This is a really great article that gets at the core of some major problems with Shepard Fairey’s work. There is a lot out there denouncing it and defending it but this is one of the better analysis’s I’ve seen….I don’t want to discourage you from going to see his work or talk but this offers a good perspective: http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2008/06/shepard_faireys_image_problem.html#more

Fairey fakes the funk, & keeps it REAL fake while fooling everyone to think he’s the hottest ish out there. There is NO problem with referncing or using images,but if youre gonna copy them you gotta give dues to the originators, not pawn it off as your own as he has done for years & years..

& for all you Fairey supporters that see value in his art, he may have nice esthetics but terrible ethics, inform yourselves & you may use that to grow…..

Shepard Fairey always acknowledges his sources of imagery, and getting where they come from is part of the “reverse propaganda” strategy he’s used for years. He always talks about his sources and how he reinterprets them and puts them in a new context. Those wanting him to be something he’s not or keeping all bets off until the never-achieved utopia need to see the larger art historical context of appropriation art from Warhol to today. Of course, he knows all these negative and uniformed comments and has anticipated them. Those who can only attack an imaginary fiction of the artist and are doing nothing positive on their own should reassess what they do with their time.

Two false constructions: “revolutionary imagery” — the reverse propaganda works to provoke thought and awareness in an imperfect democracy that he believes should be improved, not overturned, and given more to all the people. “American capitalism” is always the first simplistic false construction of uninformed, tired old discourse; there is no referent to this term because today’s economy is international and interdependent (as the current financial crisis exposes). There is only one economy and we are all part of it. If you are suggesting that artists should not make a living with their art and not be good businesspeople, then there is no starting point for discussion. Shepard gives back more to the community and to progressive political causes than any artist I know. If his art has helped in any way to move a “regime change” forward in the US, as many people think it has, then what better impact could there be? What are his detractors doing? I’d like to see one example of anything his detractors have done to create a positive change in the world.

mediologist: perhaps you should point R5 to some very interesting theoretical reading about intertextuality?

also, what would be “correct attributes”? an honest question - are we talking royalties? credit on each piece’s title? should every text that has ever referenced, blatantly or not, another text be subject to these sort of “correct attributes”?

anyone ever heard of the term “appropriation” ???
its only the most prominent device in artmaking since the death of modernism in the 50’s. From the philosophical heights of Roland Barthes and Foucault in the 60’s to Warhol’s factory in the 70’s to the Brooklyn ghettos where rap originated in the 80’s, and its all about appropriation and recontextualization. Fairey isn’t the zeitgeist bomb many say he is, but he at least has found a means to speak to a largely uneffectual youth culture while also using an aesthetic language that is both sophisticated and populist. Call it the Warhol formula.
I like his work, as evidenced here: http://themarvelouscollective.com