02.27
We apologize in advance if you’re sick of all the Shep talk, but Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker wrote a truly excellent piece in this weeks edition exploring Shepard Fairey’s (Juxtapoz cover #82) career and contributions o the Obama campaign that we just had to share.
In reference to Shepard’s HOPE poster, Schjeldahl writes, “It exploited a familiar graphic device—exalted and refined by Andy Warhol—of polarizing photographs into solid darks and blank lights, thus rendering volumetric subjects dead flat. […] The effect is that of epic poetry in an everyday tongue.”
Schjeldahl continues, “Fairey’s street work popularized a going fashion for academic deconstruction, with pretensions to exposing the malign operations of mass culture. Hip rather than populist, the Andre campaign projects an audience dumb enough to fall for media manipulation while smart enough to absorb a critique of it.”
If you’re craving a well articulated, in-depth look at Shepard Fairey’s contributions, read the entire New Yorker article now.
