When I first saw Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster, I liked it. That is until I found out the ugly truth behind most of his work (including the Obama promotional poster). It turns out that he is known for outright thieving other artists work and photos and creating his work from it. Check out Mark Vallen's critique for more info. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were made off the “Hope” poster. However, the photographer that took the original photo Fairey traced over (Mannie Garcia), has not been given a single cent.Fairey calls himself an "appropriation artist". For what Fairey does to be appropriation, he would have to be “borrowing” work from outside the “art community” to create something new. The original photographer's image was a work of art in its own right and was not changed by Fairey other than turning it into a graphic image. The only time this is enough is in the case of satire. He didn’t really change the meaning behind the image. He just traced over it in a computer program (probably Adobe Illustrator) and claimed it was his own. This is plagiarism.
Because of all this, I was inspired to create my own satirical version of the “Hope” poster. I call it "!Plagiarist". It is currently available for sale as a t-shirt on RedBubble.
For reference, I used a picture I found on the internet of Fairey. I don’t know the name of the photographer that took the picture of him, but fully intend to set aside 20% of all earnings from this image to give to them, should they come forward.
I toyed with a number of words to use before I settled on “plagiarist” and I’m still not 100% that I picked the best word. Some have suggested that people like Duchamp or Warhol are plagiarists in the same way that Fairey is. I wouldn’t consider Duchamp to be a plagiarist. What he did was challenge what the public perceived as art. Did he create the original work? Not really, but he did shed a new light on the everyday object. Warhol took what Duchamp did to the next level in a sense. He took the every day and shed a somewhat satirical light on it. Unfortunately, Warhol was also indirectly responsible for reality television and artists like Fairey.
You might be asking, "Didn't all the money he got from the sale of the "Hope" poster go to the Obama campaign?". Most of it did. However, the original artist should have still received a cut of the money to do with as they saw fit.
