A lesson in how to keep activists from winning: Don't let acceding to their demands be the path of least resistance.

There are 2 murals at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Koreatown, which is part of the Los Angeles Unified School District:

There's this one, by Beau Stanton, which is attacked because the rays emanating from the head remind some people of the Japanese imperial battle flag, and which the L.A. school district plans to paint over.

And this one, by Shepard Fairey (who's famous for those Obama "Hope" posters) which depicts Robert F. Kennedy.

Now, Shepard Fairey is using "the only leverage I have" and saying that if Stanton's mural is painted over, he demands that his own RFK mural be painted over.

The Stanton mural is not on the theme of Japan or Korea. It's a painting of Ava Gardner!

Fairey said it’s important for the school district to understand that it made a poor decision in succumbing to what it apparently considered to be the path of least resistance. The artist said he wants to create and encourage some counter-resistance.

His Kennedy mural is arguably one of the school’s defining visual elements. It is on an outside wall of the entrance to the library, which is built on the footprint of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom where Kennedy gave his last speech, in 1968. Moments later, an assassin fatally shot the presidential candidate in a pantry area next to the kitchen....

“I have talked to a teacher from RFK about where the students stand, and they overwhelmingly want the mural to stay,” Fairey wrote to [school board President Monica Garcia, who represents Koreatown]. “If Beau’s mural is removed I will reach out to students to have them take part in my mural being painted over as a symbol of the sacrifices that are sometimes necessary to stand up for important principles."... 

“What [Stanton] has in his mural is nothing close to the battle flag. It’s not the same color scheme. It’s not the same focal element. It’s stupid to me. I thought that cooler heads would prevail because this is absurd.”

The school district's senior regional administrator, Roberto Martinez, has compared the Stanton mural to Confederate statues and argued that, in both cases, the value of the art doesn't outweigh the offense to people. Fairey says:

“I’m from the South,” Fairey said. “I know that loving the Confederacy is at best a nostalgia for some sort of rebellious identity that probably never existed except as fantasy, or at worst it’s coded racism. The comparison of the mural to Confederate statues is asinine.”...

Confederate statues do display respect for the Confederacy, but I don't think anyone believes that the sun rays in the Ava Gardner mural were intended to display respect for the WWII Japanese.

Sun rays are a common element in Stanton’s work, and Fairey has used them, too. Critics of the decision have pointed out that it could be an aesthetic, ethical and logistical quagmire to begin purging representations of sun rays from all or parts of Los Angeles.

They want to get rid of the sun!

An artist named Gore made a painting of Donald Trump as a naked man with a small penis and now someone is anonymously threatening to sue her if she tries to sell it.

The only ground I can see for a lawsuit would be from a photographer who claims to have made an image — either of the face or the body — that may have been used to make the painting (as Shepard Fairey was sued over his "Hope" poster). But why would such a person issue an anonymous threat to sue? I'm dubious. I'm dubious about a lot of what I'm reading here. There have been bids of over £100,000? Where would you want to put this thing? Or is it an investment? If it's an investment, the value is leveraged by all the publicity surrounding it, which makes the painting a prop in what one might call performance art. We're also told that the painting was shown at the Maddox Gallery "after galleries in the US refused to host the piece due to security concerns following threats of violence from Trump’s supporters." Really? Have police reports been filed? Or is this just the usual speculation about the violent tendencies of Trump supporters?

[Illma] Gore said: “The reaction, especially in the UK, has been incredibly supportive. Everywhere apart from America has been great. Who knew it would be such a big deal?”

Big... small... what's the difference?

But I'd just like to say that in 2004, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart put out a book called "America (The Book)," that used photoshopping to present the 9 Justices of the Supreme Court completely naked.

And as Bob Dylan sang: "But even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked." That's from "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." Bob was bleeding out of his wherever.

The artist Sarah Sole calls her artistic take on Hillary Clinton "libidinal," distinguishing it from "all of the man-love for Obama" — such as Shepard Fairey's HOPE poster.

Rolling Stone explains.

People like Fairey "would project the most sublime, personable, personal aspirations [onto Obama]. He was pure, he was wonderful, and so of course they're going to be disappointed," Sole says. "I don't do that with Hillary. I like Hillary's impurities."...

Sole explains that the painting, "Red Gun," is a play on a photograph of Natalie Wood that ran in Life magazine in the Fifties. "The gun is the phallic power, it's sexual, but it's not eroticizing violence — it's eroticizing the idea of women with power, phallic power," she says.

To Sole, it's sexy. The sexiness of Hillary Clinton was what drew her in. "I just like her swagger. She's got something very butch about her that I like. Part of the delight of Hillary was that I was attracted to her, physically," she says. "And it was fun playing with that, even if I didn't paint well enough to make her into a beautiful woman."

You can see some of the paintings at the link and lots more of them here. You might like them, even if you're laughing at (or with) her "I didn't paint well enough to make her into a beautiful woman."

Here's what I think is the source material alongside "Red Gun":



I like this idea of taking a photograph of one person and redoing it with another person. There's commentary in the difference between the two.

What did the artist mean by "I didn't paint well enough to make her into a beautiful woman"?

HC is beautiful and I didn't do her justice.

To me, HC has an aura of beauty that I can't figure out how to depict visually.

Only a genius could turn that subject matter into a beautiful woman.

I'm also an artist of the verbal realm, intriguing you with all those variations of meaning.

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ADDED: I think Sole is trying to do something like what Drew Friedman has done so brilliantly. Look at "Warts and All" (and the other Friedman books you'll see at that link). He worked from photographs of celebrities and he sure didn't try to make them beautiful. He leaned into surreal ugliness. Friedman's work appeared in Spy Magazine from 1986 to 1992. When I thought about that I had an a-ha moment:

"When I made the 'Hope' poster, I did it as a grassroots endeavor. I thought, 'I’m a street artist who’s been very critical frequently of government policy.'"

"There’s no way that Obama’s campaign will think that I’m anything but toxic.'... I’m really happy that the ‘Hope’ poster has become a reference point, and I have very complex feelings about Obama as president, about how my art is sometimes reinterpreted.... But it’s a net-positive because I think what I did, coming from very few resources and from an outsider perspective, demonstrates that grassroots art can make a difference."

Said Shepard Fairey, who's got a new huge mural of a wave in Jersey City.

"Just because he is a well-known artist does not take away the fact that he is also a vandal."

"And that's what we consider was done, in these instances, was vandalism."

"I have plenty of reservations about everything Obama’s doing now – I’m not so into domestic drones, I’m not so into spying."

Said the artist Shepard Fairey, whose advertisement for "HOPE" conned the world.

I did a Google images search on "hope" and Fairey's poster did not come up first. This did. It didn't even come up second. This bullshit did. It didn't even come up third. This treacle did. This dumb thing was fourth. And this insipidity came up fifth. Some lady's hands offering us "hope" written on a piece of paper is sixth. 7-13 are also not Fairey's Obama poster. 14 is a parody of the Obama poster:



I had to go all the way to the 18th hit to get to the Obama poster:



And here's the Wikipedia article on "Hope."

Hope is the state which promotes the desire of positive outcomes related to events and circumstances in one's life or in the world at large....

What a bad idea for a political slogan. Obviously... now.

Obama's name comes up near the top of this article, right next to this diagram:



We're told of some book that examines "Dealers in Hope," including Obama (and Moses) and says that a leader can "Lead Change and Shape Culture" "by creating a hopescape and harnessing the hope system," and if you look again at the diagram, you'll see the "hope diamond" to be made from that lump of coal labeled "adversity." Just get some voice and promises vectors going into your imagination machine.

"I failed for a long time in this project.... In some ways, really poor places are quite easy to photograph...."

The photographer, Aaron Huey, realizes he must take a point of view. The result is, of course, propaganda. Beautiful propaganda.

Imagine if he'd chosen a different point of view. What would that propaganda have looked like?

Clearly, from the artistic perspective, Huey chose the best point of view.

The Most Inappropriate Nausea of the Day.

A writer over at Pajamas Media whose name appears in an unreadable font — Jebuda? Jehuda? — assumes we readers will all want to puke when we see that Shepard Fairey — the artist behind the famous Obama "Hope" poster — is working on a new movie version of George Orwell’s 1984.

That’s right: we may soon see in screens big and small a movie that could very well be advertised as “From the Dishonest Propagandist Who Brought You the Obama ‘Hope’ Poster.”

There’s something very fitting about a dishonest propagandist pushing for a whole new 1984 movie, but coming from Obama booster Ron Howard and Shepard Fairey, this project might amount to – if it’s ever produced – a version of 1984 that would make George Orwell spin in his grave.

First, I think what would make Orwell "spin in his grave" is your use of the phrase "spin in his grave." Good lord, you purport to care about Orwell, yet you blithely violate one of the most memorable rules in his famous essay "Politics and the English Language": "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

Newsweek's "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" cover story and photo.

First, the photo. Why that photo? Some people think he looks awful — old, squinty, puffy — but I think it's an effort to evoke the old "HOPE" poster. Actually, it looks more like "hope" than the original Shepard Fairey image, which looks a little hunched-up and blank by comparison. The new image shows Obama, burdened and beleaguered, having sacrificed his youth for us, peering into the future... and yes, there is still hope.

Second, the article, by Andrew Sullivan. Based on the cover headline — "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" — I don't even want to read it. It just seems like red meat for Obama fans. And what a cliché! Republicans are stupid. That's what they always say. It's not just red meat, it's the same old red meat they always serve. You know, you have to be kind of dumb to be so easily pulled in by the assurance that you're with the smart people and those other people are stupid.

For the article under that headline to be any good, it would need to offer criticisms of Obama that are ostensibly smarter than the what the supposedly dumb critics are putting forth. A mere defense of Obama — you've got to be dumb not to appreciate him — would be so insipid.

UPDATE: I respond to Sullivan's complaining about my failure to read his article.

"Keep our protest CIVIL/Don't become Incited/THE NATION IS WATCHING/And so are our children!"

2 young men with good signs at the Wisconsin State Capitol last night:


(Enlarge.)

Someone put a blindfold on the "Forward" statue:



And, in the rotunda, the old "Obey" image has been Walker-ized:



(All photos by Meade.)

Transparencies.

Sheperd Fairey admits to deception in the litigation about the photograph he used to make the Obama "Hope" poster.

To make the poster he needed to "reference" — his verb — a photo of Obama, and now he wants to defend that use under the Copyright Law. To promote the acceptance of a broad definition of "fair use," it would help if he were thought of as a good guy — the artist, who should be supported in his creative endeavors and given access to the raw materials that he uses for the general benefit of society. And now we see that he has infected his repution with wrongdoing:

"Throughout the case, there has been a question as to which Mannie Garcia photo I used as a reference to design the HOPE image," Fairey said. "The AP claimed it was one photo, and I claimed it was another."

New filings to the court, he said, "state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used...and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong. In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images."

In February, the AP claimed that Fairey violated copyright laws when he used one of their images as the basis for the poster.  In response, the artist filed a lawsuit against the AP, claiming that he was protected under fair use. Fairey also claimed that he used a different photo as the inspiration for his poster.

The copyright issue itself should remain the same, and it's an important one indeed. It's a damned shame that the banner for expansive fair use is being carried by someone who was dishonest and who tried to play the legal system. Why is he admitting his deception now? Presumably, he knew the manipulations would come to light one way or the other, and it was a strategic decision to reveal it this way.

Obviously, this is also an occasion to craft jokes analogizing the Fairey mess to what the subject of the poster is doing, with all the usual sarcasm over the word "hope." Not that any of that mess is poor Obama's fault.

Shepard Fairey — who made the famous Obama "Hope" poster — thinks the Joker Obama poster is "great."

"The artwork is great in that it gets a point across really quickly. The Joker is a sinister, evil character that can't be trusted. And if they want to make that parallel with Obama — bam."

Somehow the L.A. Times sees fit to headline the article "Shepard Fairey has 'doubts' about intelligence of Obama Joker artist." The intelligence doubt is actually a "grammar" point, that the caption should be "socialist," not "socialism," because it's a picture of a man, not his belief system. Hmmm... but Mr. Fairey, your poster of Obama has the word "Hope" as the caption. If it's an error, you made it too. If it's a sign of low intelligence, why should I listen to you, a man of low intelligence?

"This is a fun process, I'll say that," says Shepard Fairey.

The artist — famed for that Obama "Hope" image — laughs at efforts to prosecute him for vandalism.

Shepard Fairey sues AP before it sues him.

"Mr. Fairey’s lawyers... contend in the suit that Mr. Fairey used the photograph only as a reference and transformed it into a 'stunning, abstracted and idealized visual image that created powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message” from that of the shot [Mannie] Garcia took. The suit asks the judge to declare that Mr. Fairey’s work is protected under fair-use exceptions to copyright law, which allow limited use of copyrighted materials for purposes like criticism or comment."

I hope Fairey wins this one. To make an Obama poster, an artist has to refer to some image of Obama, and Fairey chose a perfectly generic photograph. How else are you supposed to do an artwork about a famous person? Garcia's image was mainly the raw material Obama provided by having a face. I suppose Fairey could have looked at a couple images and made a freehand drawing or morphed a series of photographs, but he still would have needed to appropriate someone's photography.

Further complicating the dispute, Mr. Garcia contends that he, not The Associated Press, owns the copyright for the photo, according to his contract with the The A.P. at the time. In a telephone interview on Monday, Mr. Garcia said he was unsure how he would proceed now that the matter had landed in court. But he said he was very happy when he found out that his photo was the source of the poster image and that he still is.

Well, if this were a Civil Procedure exam, that would be a good joinder problem.

“I don’t condone people taking things, just because they can, off the Internet,” Mr. Garcia said. “But in this case I think it’s a very unique situation.”

No, it's really not unique, other than the high profile of the artwork and the consequential strong whiff of money. I hope Fairey uses the power he has acquired to establish the rights of smaller artists to use news photographs to make artworks about celebrities.

He added, “If you put all the legal stuff away, I’m so proud of the photograph and that Fairey did what he did artistically with it, and the effect it’s had.”

I ♥ Garcia. But let me say that his pride in the new and brilliantly expanded life of his photograph is something that belongs in the law, something that should affect the fair use doctrine. What if Garcia had been asked at the outset: Would you accept the use of your photograph in this manner, with no money going to you, or would you prefer that the artist appropriated someone else's generic photo of Obama's face? Because it's obvious that Garcia would say yes [— please use my photograph —], I would like to see the court hold it to be fair use.

"Fairey's warrants weren't just outstanding — they were FABULOUS!"

Says chuck b., noting the arrest — and the epithetish name — of the Obama poster artist.

Shepard Fairey was in Boston on Friday for his new exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Police Officer James Kenneally says the department had Jan. 24 warrants alleging the Los Angeles artist tagged property with graffiti.

***

Here's a slide show of Fairey's work from the Institute for Contemporary Art. Here's an old post of mine that includes a photo I took of the old Andre the Giant "Obey" image, without knowing what it was or having ever heard the name Shepard Fairey. I called it "an unrecognizable face on a lamppost":



And really, why should an artist get away with appropriating public property like this? I love Fairey, but it seems that he's committed a lot of crimes along his path to fame. Does he belong in prison for it? Should a man who stomped on a kitty go to prison for a year? But Fairey's crimes were fabulous (and his warrants were outstanding). It is not fabulous to stomp a kitten.

IN THE COMMENTS: Zachary Paul Sire says:

I wonder how everyone here would react had Fairey's subject and object of affection been Sarah Palin.

Oh, that's easy. Then he would belong in jail for a year, just like the kitty stomper. Fairey's more like a cockroach stomper. See the difference? Your sentence depends on whether we love or hate you.