Shepard Fairey VS MIC

I've been taking public transport, and yes I have to say it is as bad as they say it is. Even in the eastern suburbs. But that's not what I want to bitch about today. Looking from the 109 tram windows as you leave the North Richmond station end of Victoria St heading up to Saint V's, Smith St, Brunswick St etc. somebody had plastered a section of some wall with Shepard Fairey's Andre the Giant posters. Walking down Swanston St I saw them again outside Crossroads or some other restaurant. Near the skate shop.
I'm fairly certain, but not completely certain I have seen them from the train line plastered on fences and concrete walls that back onto the tracks.

I mean I'm not really surprised, offended, or impressed by them. What makes an impression is that they seem to have appeared recently.

As in, it's 2011.

Why is anyone putting up Andre the Giant 'Obey' posters in 2011?

Shepard Fairey created the Obama 'Hope' poster for Obama's 2008 campaign, shortly afterwards it was widespread and imitated. Fairey was not exactly unknown to people 'in the know' before the Hope poster.

So what is the fucking point of putting up his now well known 'Obey' posters on the streets of Melbourne.

It just doesn't make sense to me. Why would somebody in Melbourne go out at night, spot locations and risk paltry fines to stick up somebody else's art that is already well known? It just doesn't make sense.

It only just occured to me in the writing of this, that it may be just 'viral marketing' by whoever owns the distribution rights to Shepard Fairey's Apparel, and they are trying to create brand recognition, and also treat their consumers post purchase cognitive dissonance by convincing them that their apparel is cutting edge underground street art.

But that kind of ruins my hypothesis and gripe. My hypothesis was that somebody actually thinks it is a cool idea to print out Shepard Fairy poster's on mass and glue them up in primo locations around Melbourne. That this person somehow thinks they are enriching the underground art scene by doing so.

This is the full extent to which I would ever concede they have a point: My art teacher in high school Vicky, on her first class with me informed myself (and every other student) that the art by students had been taken down and replaced with good art because we needed a certain quality of art to inspire us and make us strive to achieve more. Shepard Fairy certainly is a good artist, his work deserves to be displayed somewhere.

But consider MIC. If you live in my town you know his work. This is his work:


Indeed when I first learned the artist's Moniker I remember reading that you really need to travel all of Melbourne's trainlines to appreciate how extensive and prolific his work is. You can see his faces on the Upfield line, the Glen Waverley Line, at St Kilda Junction, the Epping Line, The Belgrave, Lillydale lines, pretty much everywhere you go in Melbourne, you will see MIC's faces somewhere.

I am concerned some idiot will plaster over these individually hand painted local artists' work with a mass printed 'OBEY' poster.

I have written before about the ever increasing fidelity of trends through globalisation. And atrguably that post is more interesting than this one. You can read it here.

So rather than rehashing my explanation of how it works, scalability and stuff I thought I would expand upon my problem with it.

There is something unrespectable about the cringing servility of saying 'Melbourne is a backwater, New York is cool. We should cover Melbourne's streets with images of New York.' Like it is just plain pathetic.

Certainly I buy all my clothes from Dr. Jays and wear african beads. But that's different. Black People are much cooler than white people. Art is something else all together.

MIC and Shepard Fairey are almost opposite ends of the spectrum. MIC is relatively anonymous, he recycles and scavanges all his paints and painting materials and paints each of his faces individually in an almost obsessive compulsive manner. Shepard Fairey is not anonymous, I don't know how he creates his original images, but he then just prints them onto desired medium and then pastes or sticks them up. Each a carbon copy of the next.

The prolific spread of MIC's faces, given that they are all unique is impressive. The prolific spread of Fairey's Andre the Giant 'Obey' stickers is not. Shepard Fairey is a talented artist. But he doesn't need more space, to invade our public spaces like Windsor Smith shoe billboards furthermore, I don't understand why space in Melbourne's heritage listed Graffiti laneways has been dedicated to his posters:



Go see them and appreciate, just how unimpressive they are pasted up next to beautiful unique hand painted murals that sorround them. That visual experience is probably the best counter-argument I could produce. You would realise that you don't need to be in one of these fashion capitals like New York, Paris, London or Tokyo to produce something new and quality. You could be in Chadstone for example and still produce great art.

I have said before, it was no accident that Florence produced Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Botticelli (and yes, Donatello) it wasn't some random coalescing of the stars. Florence simply decided to support it's local artists, and with that support and public space and funding, it produced at least two of the greatest artists ever to have walked the earth. They two were not immune from globalisation or derivation, the Renaissance was a return in many ways to greek and roman classicism.

What they didn't do was take prestige space like the Plaza where David stood, and fill it with copies of Greek Sculpture. Case in point, Shepard Fairey resides in Los Angeles and was trained in Rhode Island. He wasn't part of the New York street scene in actuality. When you are talking about one of the most reproduced artists coming out of America's smallest state, you may as well believe Melbourne is capable of producing good artists too.

But really the finger has to be squarely pointed at the artists themselves. MIC does his own thing, my concern is with the peeps sticking up the Obey posters. Do you really think you are ever going to achieve your own great work of art, by hanging pictures on walls for other artists. Pick up your paints, your sharpie, your own feces whatever and make something. Quit trying to import a street scene, be the street scene.