Obama plagiarist has a legal posse Artist Shepard Fairey is facing a Grand Jury probe for falsifying evidence in a copyright case. Fairey was suing Associated Press over the use of an copyright image Fairey had used as the basis for a popular Obama election poster. To the dismay of the Boing Boing crowd, Fairey turned out not to be a "copyrighting" hero, but a …
To hear the Boing Boing trust-fund kiddies tell it, Fairey can do no wrong -- he's a buddy of theirs, after all, whereas the Associated Press, being composed mostly of people who have to actually work for a living instead of getting to play with websites and TV shows and what-have-you as they please, is their implacable enemy.
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This is not an easy call. There is long history of making small modifications an existing work which completely changes the impact and meaning. Did Andy Warhol rip off the guy that designed the Cambell's soup can? What about Duchamp's moustached Mona Lisa?
In music, bands do covers all the time and no one seems upset.
Maybe not a plonker, just a wally.
Andy Warhol and Duchamp actually made modifications to classic images: Warhol by painting a can of Campbell's Soup as a kind of massive, totem-like image, Duchamp's moustache on the Mona Lisa as a form of commentary on the insular, hidebound art "establishment".
As far as bands doing covers goes, I have yet to hear a single cover version that was basically a note-for-note knockoff of the original. Case in point: Wendy O. Williams And The Plasmatics' version of Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man".
Let's get this straight. His picture copies the outlines of someone else's picture, but all steps from that point on are his own, right? And this is enough for it to be plagiarism? It's a good job Andy Warhol's dead then, otherwise he'd be in dead trouble for his paintings of soup cans which copied the soup can label much more exactly.
Have been wondering for some time now when I hear Fairey /Obama issue come up why there isn't a mention of the folks HE sued for using his *ahem* Original work product.
I think his suits against the folks who modified his Obama/Hope image to Nope, Dope and Hype should be mentioned since their one character edits express a lot more political content than the artistic content of his tri-tone posterization, and appropriation of Obama's keyword ever conveyed.
It was obvious to anyone looking at Warhol's picture that he had copied the soup tins. This fraud and plagiarist Shepard Fairey is copying stuff, disguising its origin and pretending he created it himself. That's plagiarism.
I suggest you read the Mark Vallen essay linked to in the article. It explains it quite well.
Fairey, please do a Gordon Brown poster in the same style as your ooooBama one. It could have the slogan "Change.... Yes please and hurry the f**k up about it!"
Or how about a John Prescott one: "Pies you can believe in!"
Margaret Thatcher: "I used to be the Prime Minister? Did I? What's a Prime Minister?"
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