People who reference Duchamp when defending Fairey are willfully ignorant. When Duchamp (who in fact, actually made many of his supposed readymades) unveiled them, they were mocking the pretentiousness of art. Compare this to Fairey, who labels his bullshit artwork a “lesson in phenomenology”, and then acts in all seriousness like a fucking Andre the Giant face on a dollar bill is “serious artwork”. When people started to come up with highfaluting critique son what Duchamps urinals meant, he fled the art world and moved first to installation pieces, and finally out of it completely, dedicating the rest of his life mostly to chess.

In fact, this is part of the reason why Lichtenstein and Warhol’s later works went down hill; they started to buy the bullshit people said about them. By the 80′s Warhol sincerely believed that the shallowness he once ostensibly mocked, was the raison d’tiere of life. He even published a ridiculous gossip magazine mostly about him and others in the NY party scene in an attempt to prove his own immortal words, that forever haunted him, “that everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame”.

Did you get permission to post this art? lolzords,

MF:

“i’m not making a profit from it”

BY:

sorry, i apologize.

It’s so 19th century !!! So romantic, as in the romantic movement. I don’t blame you as it’s still a widely shared view on what an author is.

The thing is, “individual will” is probably the worst part in creation. Most of our individual wills are mundane, dull.

Accidents, chance, inspiration, subconsciousness, contradictions, amorality, desires, external constraints are a major part of creation.

And, youknow, you can will as you want, but you never really know WHAT is willing through you when you will… do you?

“This is HIGHLY UNETHICAL”

Well, it probably is unethical. But I’m not sure ethic as something to do with the quality of any artwork. It doesn’t seems like a factor in assessing if something is sucessful as an artwork.

For that matter, a lot of artwork from the past centuries and decades is and was sexist, for example.

The act of creation, regardless of medium, is an act of individual will. It requires the creator to have a vocabulary to work with, whether words, gestures, symbols, etc. Sometimes it can be a fine line between using fair use and plagiarism, and we all know that; sometimes things are gray.

Fairey is profiting off of the historical misery of others. Many of the images come from marginalized peoples or radicalized political movements; these people are highly unlikely to sue for copyright infringement, and Fairey knows this, and in fact counts on it. But he takes these images and uses them, often line for line, without crediting the original creators. This is HIGHLY UNETHICAL, and robs the audience of an additional layer of meaning to the pieces.

Allyson, this is where your analogy falls down. If Fairey were using a single image (of, say, a gun) as part of a larger composition, people probably wouldn’t have such an issue. But he uses whole swaths of other people’s imagery, and often makes it the center of his pieces.

Of course there are issues of law and copyright at work here, but ultimately I feel sorry for Fairey; he takes meaningful images and leaves them meaningless.