Tuesday morning at the ICA, I huddled over my coffee and bundt-cake wedge with dozens of other reporters, all of us awaiting the press preview tour of street artist Shepard Fairey’s retrospective. It was an unusually large crowd for one of these things, basically because Fairey has become our Zeigeist artist these days—mainly thanks to his ubiquitous Obama “HOPE” portrait, of course. (Plus, he designed the last Smashing Pumpkins album called, um, Zeitgeist…but I digress.)

Still, I wasn’t paying much attention to the crowd, despite the TV crew and radio reporter (WBUR’s Andrea Shea was a familiar face, after all), and I didn’t even read anything in Jill Medvedow’s joking “welcome to Boston” message as she waved to the snowstorm outside. At that point, it was just a comfortable event welcoming back a now-famous artist who got his start as a RISD student, putting up street art all over Providence.

No, what really got my attention that the press for Fairey’s opening was a different group was this conversation I overheard in the packed elevator:

Fiftysomething man: Hmm, Providence must be “the cool city” these days.

Thirtysomething woman: I guess so. RISD is in Rhode Island then?

I kid you not. And that’s when I realized that many of these reporters had descended on us from far outside the Northeast—so far out that they didn’t even connect the letters “RI” with Little Rhody. In fact, they’d come from all over the world. To Boston. To see a guy who admits being arrested 14 times for vandalism.

It was a good morning and a great show, even if the pilgrimage of press felt heavily seasoned with rock-star flattery. Indeed, Fairey’s entrance midway through the gallery tour was near-cinematic. We were in the room full of his portraits of musical icons when co-curator Pedro Alonzo was explaining Fairey’s adoration of the Clash’s late frontman, Joe Strummer.

Alonzo: Shepard learned from Joe Strummer that you could be cool and socially conscious at the same time–

Fairey (suddenly entering, wearing black “The Clash: London Calling” T-shirt): …And I’m still living up to that ethos.

Alonzo and Fairey laughed that this all was accidentally timed, and I’m sure it was, but the effect on the horde was almost amusingly electric, with gasps, applause, and camera flashes erupting in sync.

The Q&A at the end of the tour was similarly breathless, with a few “questions” decidedly leaning towards the “let me tell you how big a fan I am” variety. I mean, you can count me in as a big Shepard Fairey fan too, but some of these folks were disciples. And it was ironic that an artist who has laudably made a career out of questioning authority would be treated with such reverence. To his credit, Fairey posed a humorous, candid figure, mixing confidence in his message with modesty in his accomplishments.

Of course, such good-natured aplomb comes in handy for the inevitable backlash. Witness Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman’s evisceration of Fairey’s work on boston.com, where he says the artist just steals and repurposes other people’s images, then criticizes the artist for doing commercial work for Pepsi. Well, I already disagreed with Wasserman’s points, and now after seeing the full breadth of Fairey’s work and hearing him speak about it solidified my appreciation of his oeuvre. Wasserman’s blog post has already netted more than 100 comments, so I won’t be offering much new, but here goes:

Of course, Fairey’s art appropriates other people’s images, drawing from 100 years of propaganda and popular culture–his repurposed and redefined images are meant to create uncomfortable paradoxes by reconfiguring the responses these familiar images usually trigger. Many have made the comparison of Fairey to Warhol and Lichtenstein, even if Fairey’s work is far more political. As the artist himself said yesterday: “A lot of people are better at making a pretty picture than me, but what I’m trying to do is create an image that is visually arresting, but to have a point of view is just as important to me.”

And perhaps it’s because I have a bias towards street art, but the idea of putting these images into a blender and repeating them over and over again, with as wide a distribution as possible…well, that’s been a viable mode of expression for decades longer than Fairey’s last 20 years. One pro-Fairey comment on Wasserman’s blog criticized the writer, saying that he probably thinks hiphop isn’t music, and that analogy works for me. Despite all this, I think it’s a stale debate.

Of course, as I write this, the Associated Press is seeking compensation for Fairey’s use of their Obama photo in the “HOPE” portrait. Methinks that the AP should let this one go, even if they have a case, and I agree with Fast Company’s Danielle Sacks that the suit could be a PR horsepile for the AP. It certainly seems painfully opportunistic to sue him now, after the piece has become cultural icon, and most likely a lasting one at that.

And besides, Fairey may not have been raking it in from the image itself. As he said at the preview, he just wanted the image to be disseminated as broadly as possible, which is why it was available during the campaign for download on his website, and if you sent him $10 via PayPal, he’d send you 20 posters to put up yourself. (Of course, soon each one was instantly fetching $800 or more on eBay, but it’s not like Fairey saw that money.)

More interesting to me is the subject of Fairey making money with his commercial work, and he’s unapologetic about that. He sees an increased blurring of the lines everywhere these days of commercial art, graphic art, and fine art, and he’s certainly Exhibit A for this synthesis. To be honest, I had resisted the adulation of Fairey for years mainly because I thought he was basically a gifted graphic designer. But time and time again, I’d be stopped dead by an image on an album cover, in a magazine, on a warehouse wall–and only afterwards realize that Fairey was responsible for it all. When that happens enough times, you start thinking an artist is pretty damn good.

And as if to answer the critics of Fairey’s moneymaking projects, in the final room called “Question Everything,” there are two huge canvases facing each other, one showing the good side of capitalism and the other side the bad. Though often branded as a member of the Gen-X left, Fairey takes a highly pragmatic approach to his work, saying earnestly on Tuesday that he believes in capitalism, that it rewards people who work hard, that it has helped him earn a living doing what he loves…it’s just that we succumb to the bad side when we worship the dollar over everything else, including the underlying substance of our work. In other words, he was drawing the difference between mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Sound familiar?

Of course, ICA curator Nicholas Baume seized on this specific point, calling Fairey “prescient” about our current economic meltdown, furthering the Zeitgeist zeal in the room. But hey, maybe it’s because Fairey and I are about the same age, but this overall look at 20 years of the artist’s work feels like my own popular/political history of the U.S. over the past two decades.

Okay, so now I’ve spent exactly 1,200 words writing about Boston’s Fairey fixation…how is the exhibit anyway? Despite all my humbugging about the horde at the top of this piece, I have to say the show is fantastic. It’s breathtaking to see the full range of his expression as filtered through rigorously set parameters (for example, almost all is in red/black/white colors only). Each individual Fairey work is meant to pop on its own, so they strafe your retinas en masse.

For obsessive Fairey-philes, there’s the original 20-year-old “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” sticker—complete with a hand-scrawled note from an old roomate inviting him to heat up the enchiladas in the fridge—as well as the original hand-cut acetate stencils for some of Fairey’s most iconic and repeated images. (FYI for Fairey newbies, “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” was the precursor to Fairey’s “Obey Giant” image that appeared on stickers and posters that were placed by people all over the world on walls, bridges, and billboards—essentially making it the largest public-art project of all time.)

Along with the Obama portrait, many will be drawn to the good/bad capitalism paintings and the huge “Obey Middle East” mural in the final room, but the exhibit’s mesmerizing highlight was the opposite wall that featured 90 posters. That’s where you can see his full strength as a designer, as a provocateur, and—yes—as an artist.

The exhibit is there through the summer, but get there soon, really. My only fear is that Fairey coverage is already on the edge of overkill, so you should see his work with a fresh viewpoint–instead of the viewpoint foisted on you by the zealots and the haters.

Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand opens tomorrow at the Institute Of Contemporary Art/Boston and runs through August 16. Part of this street artist’s work is free however, on display in public spaces around the city. To find his work, see this map on the ICA’s website.

One more punk legend, R.I.P.: So 2009 has not been a good year for underground rock icons, as I discovered yesterday. This was eerie: I was walking back to our offices from lunch, listening to my iPod on shuffle, when the Cramps‘ “The Natives Are Restless” popped up in my headphones. And I thought, Ahhh, I love the Cramps…where are they now…man, Lux Interior might be the craziest lead singer alive…wait, is he still alive?

This rather lazy thoughtstream kinda passed out of my head until a few hours later that evening, when news spread across the music blogs that, in fact, Lux Interior (aka Eric Lee Purkhiser) had just died from a heart condition. Coincidence, or spooky premonition? Considering that one of Lux Interior’s lyrical trademarks was hilariously goofy old-school horror-movie references, I’m going with the latter.

Anyway, the Cramps never became all that famous, nor were they all that influential, unlike the Stooges. The reason being: nobody could take punk, surf music, and rockabilly and smash them together with the same genius for reckless abandon. Nobody sounded like them, because nobody could sound like them. I first heard of them as a teen when watching endless reruns of the seminal postpunk film Urgh! A Music War (still my favorite music feature of all time), where they were absolutely the most ripping band in the whole show, where Lux Interior writhed only in lowcut leather pants and heaved into a microphone literally shoved down his gullet. Honestly, this first impression freaked me out, but in that good way that makes you rush out to buy the records and relive the danger.

Thanks, Mr. Interior, for the memories and for being your wicked self.

If you’re unfamiliar with what I’m talking about here and you want to see some awesome live action of the band, check out Pitchfork’s eulogy page the site put up today. Wisely, they’ve used more video clips than words to do this man justice.

Images courtesy of Obey Giant Art

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Notes on the Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Posted by Matthew Reed Baker on 2/5/09 in Notes on the Culture 3 Comments »