shepard fairey tuesday: Kiss Me Deadly

In response to Fairey’s solo exhibition, Imperfect Union, (December, 2007) at the Merry Karnowski Gallery in Los Angeles, California, Mark Vallen, renowned artist, activist, illustrator and curator criticizes Fairey’s work and career as an artist, in a essay published on his Art for a Change web site. Vallen expresses his outrage at how Fairey has made a career “out of the consistent, secretive and wholesale copying of other people’s artworks” and describes why, in his opinion, “it should make obvious that anyone so ill-informed should not be in the vanguard of today’s political art”. He identifies Fairey’s work as “machine art that any second-rate art student could produce” by picking apart Fairey’s heavy usage of “silly portraits of a dead wrestling champion” as well as “absurdist propaganda”. Vallen acuses Fairey of “toying with the veneer of radical politics” when “his views are hollow and non-committal”. Vallen also explains how Fairey is “deceiving people by pawning off counterfeit works as original creations” with numerous examples of original pieces shown side by side with Fairey’s “lucrative OBEY fashion line” version. In the example of the White Panther logo, Vallen emphasizes that by “exploiting the panther logo for profit by printing it on boutique clothing, Fairey has accelerated the dehistoricization and commodification of American history”, and in his opinion, “has forfeited his ability to speak as a dissident”. He states that “Fairey is guilty of utilizing historic images simply because he “likes” them, and not because he has any grasp of their significance as objects of art or history”. Vallen further supports that “Fairey simply filches artworks and hopes that no one notices” and that “these days any amateur with a minimally written crackpot manifesto can make waves in the world of art”. If Fairey has “developed a profitable livelihood exclusively based on pilfering the artworks of others”, Vallen ultimately asks “can Shepard Fairey honestly be described as an artist who can critically assess the unholy union of government and big business, or offer comments on the underpinnings of the capitalist machine?”. Koloman Moser, Ralph “Bingo” Chaplin, Pirkle Jones, Rupert Garcia, Rene Mederos, Félix Beltrán and Gary Grimshaw are a few of the plagiarized artists that are mentioned in Vallen’s critique. [

http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm

Mark Vallen is simply trying to jumpstart his go-nowhere career by bashing someone who actually HAS one. It’s a time-honored tradition among the second-rate and failing. The fact that he passed out literature– including HIS OWN ART– amongst those standing in line at Fairey’s show ought to tell you he’s simply an opportunist out to raise his own profile. If he were truly interested in constructive dialogue he would have picked up the phone and made the local call to Fairey to ask him about it. Then, if he wasn’t satisfied with the answers– or at least wanted to include them– he could have offered up the other side of the coin. Instead, he posted a shrill call of “Look at Me!” in hopes of selling a few more canvases of his Jr. High caliber artwork. Pretty sad, really.