“ I’m bored by the kerfuffle’s rote recurrence, with its all but scripted lines for plaintiff and defendant alike. It is of a piece with Fairey’s energetic but unoriginal enterprise involving a repertoire of well-worn provocations—imitations of Soviet agitprop on shopping bags designed for Saks, to cite one example. Warhol sublimely commodified images of Mao and the hammer and sickle four decades ago, in keeping with an ambition—to infuse subjects and tones of common culture with powers of high art—that has not grown old… Fairey reverses a revolution achieved by Warhol, along with Roy Lichtenstein. He embraces a trend in what the critic Dave Hickey has called “pop masquerading as art, as opposed to art masquerading as pop.
Well, that was quick. The New Yorker, along with everyone else who makes judgments about these things, it seems, has decided Shepard Fairey is officially out of vogue. (Did people ever think he was a good artist? Or just very good at using Adobe Illustrator?) And just in time for Esquire’s February cover.
3 years ago
• 0 notes
