Obey

Street artist Shephard Fairey was arrested in Boston on Friday for tagging two buildings with images from his Obey Giant campaigns. Most have become familiarized with Fairey due to his recent commissioned work for the Obama campaign: 

Fairey, however, has been an influential force in the graf world for the last few decades. His popular Obey campaign has gained notoriety, with fair reaching influence that even pops up in Manchester, where I have seen first-hand knock offs of the well-known images. For instance, I stumbled upon this little guy near the Thirsty Scholar a few months ago:

Fairey's Obey Giant propaganda campaign was born in the late 80s with sticker bomb movements and graf stenciling. Now, Fairey has moved towards screen prints and pasting, adding a more dynamic quality to these temporal pieces that require fast application due to anti-graffiti laws in most US cities. Here are some of my favorites:

After that unnecessarily long introduction, I've three comments on Fairey's arrest (I won't get angry about neofascist police forces suppressing the creative and political voices of Boston, don't worry). First of all, I find it interesting that Fairey was arrested not because he was caught tagging, but because images from his campaign were discovered on these buildings. This seems a tad circumstantial to me and that the state really doesn't have much of a case without witnesses. I've never heard of a case against a graffiti artist that wasn't based on first-hand witness accounts. Silly.

Second, I find it a bit worrying that Fairey was arrested for images from his Obey campaign. Yet, when he was tagging the hell out of Boston with Obama images, nothing was done. Indeed, the first of his pieces that arose post-Obama were immediately attacked. The implications of this are obvious and I won't patronize you by elaborating on them further. I'll just say that bias and preference ought not exist at any level of political or creative production in terms of 'the law'.

Third, this reminds me of another incident involving the popular graff artist, Banksy, that occurred a year or so ago. Unfortunately I cannot find the news article again as so much time has passed. Basically, the story went that Banksy had tagged a wall in a small town in Spain and, due to his fame in the art world, the town had then declared the wall a public monument that was protected under a plethora of sanctions and whatnot. Still, another unknowing graff artist came along and tagged the same wall, and was promptly arrested not only for tagging but for defacing this now-famous public monument. The parallels between this story and the Fairey incident might not be particularly strong, but both really exemplify the question of who dictates what art is. When one graffiti artist, in the case of Banksy, is considered above the laws of another graffiti artist, or even when one image, in the case of Fairey's Obama, escapes graffiti laws, we enter into a very messy area of contention. In the end, it comes down to the same conservative white male dictating the definition of art that has existed for centuries, all the way to Vasari and even before. Hopefully one of these days we will rise above that, but I'm not holding my breath.