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Shepard Fairey is the artist who created the iconic “HOPE” portrait for Obama’s campaign in February 2008.
At the time, the Obama campaign officially declined to have any direct affiliation with the image, but Fairey reported that he originally put the word “PROGRESS” on the image and only changed it to HOPE after the Obama campaign asked him to do so. Obama also sent him a personal letter of thanks.
In August 2009, Fairey created a darker, moody image of Obama for Rolling Stone that clearly shows he’d lost a lot of his sunny enthusiasm for Obama.
In December 2010, when asked how he felt about having done the “HOPE” portrait of Obama and how “that hope was working out for him now?”, Fairey replied:
“You know, I’m proud of it as a piece of grassroots activism, but I’ll just leave it at that.”
Yes, Fairey is proud of his HOPE poster and his career as a Left-wing artist-activist who has made a living plagiarizing other people’s work.
In typical Leftie-Hypocrite fashion, Fairey sneers at those who want their rights protected from his depredations, then turns around and demands his rights be protected for the same behavior.
Remember the video “Occupy Toronto” that I posted a few days ago?
https://polination.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/occupy-toronto/
It was long (16 minutes), so maybe all y’all didn’t listen to the end where there was an interesting discussion of the hypocrisy of the Occupiers with regard to police and private property. In short, the handful of Occupiers who were actually in the Toronto tent city at 4 a.m. got seriously riled when Levant tried to unzip one of the empty tents. (Levant’s crew had a heat imaging camera, so knew which of the tents had people inside.)
The Occupiers said Levant was violating the personal property rights of the tents’ owners. Levant said he was merely opening an empty tent that had been left on public property, and besides, didn’t the Occupiers (who were, after all, squatting on public property without a permit) claim to not believe in private property?
This got the Occupiers angry and they proceeded to menace Levant and his crew and threaten to call the cops if they didn’t leave. These were the same people who had called cops “pigs”, thrown things at them and demanded they leave the tent city alone. Then one of them got all up in Levant’s face and snatched his prescription eyeglasses right off his face and ran away with them.
So let me think … empty tent, no touchy … prescription glasses occupying face of owner, fair game?? Remind you any of Shepard Fairey? Me, too.
Color me unsurprised that Fairey is so supportive of the “grassroots” Occupy movement (which Levant says is being funded by unions) that he has produced a POSTER (for which I’m guessing he’ll expect the courts to protect his exclusive right to all profit from sales).
This time, Fairey’s chosen a Guy Fawkes mask for the face, so I’m guessing he won’t be experiencing a repeat of the AP lawsuit. Apart from that, I find this new image interesting for a couple of reasons.
One, I think it demonstrates a real ambivalence about Obama. “We are the 99%” (which they’re not, duh) is inside an Obama campaign button, but the message says “Mr. President we HOPE you’re on our side.” Hmm.
(Gallup shows 24% support. See https://polination.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/gallup-poll-occupy-gets-the-yawn-vote/)
Poor broken-winged Far-Left birdies who thought Obama was the Messiah who would usher in the perfect Left-wing society where they got to have whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it. One might go so far as to wonder aloud at how foolish they are to continue clinging bitterly to their rainbowy, unicorn-strewn Ø dream.
I was also intrigued by Fairey’s use of Guy Fawkes for the face of “Occupy.” It got me curious who Guy Fawkes really was. Here’s what I found:
Guy Fawkes (1570 – 1606) was a Catholic convert in Protestant England who learned warfare fighting on the side of Catholic Spain against Protestant Dutch reformers and then tried to use that knowledge to assassinate the English Protestant monarch, King James I, and put a Catholic on the throne.
He was captured by the King’s men and tortured until he confessed and named his co-conspirators. The man who supervised the torture reported, Fawkes “told us that since he undertook this action he did every day pray to God he might perform that which might be for the advancement of the Catholic Faith and saving his own soul.”
On January 31, 1606, Fawkes and three of his co-conspirators were publicly hanged, drawn and quartered. And, as was the custom of the times, their body parts were distributed to “the four corners of the kingdom”, to be displayed as a warning to other would-be traitors.
Since the day of Fawkes’ arrest and the “the joyful day” of the King’s “deliverance” from assassination – November 5th – Brits have celebrated with fireworks and bonfires. Although there were a number of co-conspirators, Guy Fawkes is the one everyone remembers and November 5 is known as Guy Fawkes Day. Celebrations traditionally include the ceremonial bonfire burning of a Guy Fawkes effigy during the fireworks display, though sometimes individual groups will substitute someone else they despise, such as the Pope or Margaret Thatcher.
Do I need to elaborate on all the ways it is just WEIRD that THIS is the guy Fairey chose for the “Occupy” face? I didn’t think so.
It kinda reminds me of the way these same ignorant morons revere Che Guevera. They don’t know any more about who Guy Fawkes really was than they do about who Che Guevera really was.
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