Shepard Fairey on Fighting the AP Over Obama HOPE Image

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/02/26/Remix_Steven_Johnson_Lawrence_Lessig_and_Shepard_Fa...

Shepard Fairey, contemporary artist behind the Barack Obama "Hope" portrait, discusses the reasoning behind his lawsuit against the Associated Press. "I'm not a lawyer, I'm an artist," says Fairey. "I really believe anything that stifles one's ability to communicate and express themselves is undesirable."

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What is the future for art and ideas in an age when practically anything can be copied, pasted, downloaded, sampled, and re-imagined?

LIVE from the NYPL and WIRED Magazine kick off the Spring 2009 season with a spirited discussion of the emerging remix culture.

Our guides through this new world--who will take us from Jefferson's Bible to Andre the Giant to Wikipedia--will be Lawrence Lessig, author of Remix, founder of Creative Commons, and one of the leading legal scholars on intellectual property issues in the Internet age; acclaimed street artist Shepard Fairey, whose iconic Obama "HOPE" poster was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery; and cultural historian Steven Johnson, whose new book, The Invention of Air, argues that remix culture has deep roots in the Enlightenment and among the American founding fathers.

Shepard Fairey shot to national fame as the graphic artist behind a 2008 iconic poster of Barack Obama, a portrait labeled simply "HOPE" and in a style that could be described as Andy Warhol meets Socialist Realism. Fairey, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1992, was already well known among graffiti artists and fans, thanks to one of Fairey's early works of "guerilla" art, an impromptu stencil design based on an ad for Andre the Giant, a professional wrestler.

With permission from the staff of Obama's presidential campaign, Fairey began distributing the "HOPE" image in January of 2008. A year later, with Obama in the White House, Fairey's poster was officially displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Around the same time the Associated Press declared Shepard's poster was based on a 2006 photo taken by the AP's Manny Garcia and they should get credit and compensation. Fairey filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against the AP, arguing he didn't owe them. Fairey has appeared in the documentary films Andre the Giant Has a Posse (by Helen Stickler, first distributed in 1997) and Bomb It! (2007), and his work has been documented in the book Supply and Demand.

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[BoomerNavy70]

Screw AP.

You would have to sue every god damn artist in the world for using reference material for their work.

Do you really think artist are doing everything freehand? If you do you are an idiot. We all use reference materials from various sources, and frankly some of us have made a lot of money doing it.

He did not make a literal tranlation of the image. Once it is changed or manipulated it no longer remains the image it was before.

CASE CLOSED!

[wano180king]

GO OBEY

[bdimonn261]

Fucking capitalist America. They didn't care about the picture until they knew they could make a profit out of it and then they collected all the the money they could out if it. Fuck capitalism.

[mattg30380003]

@BoomerNavy70 Your comment comes down to one word.. "Inspiration".. Artist, musicians, writers and so on all use this word.. Nothing has been new for years..

[SeparatedApollo]

@kiinux care about something or an idea or as therapy or just to have fun rather than becoming just a tool for corporations to sell their merchandise or becoming greedy and doing it for the cash.

[SeparatedApollo]

@kiinux It was not another persons exact work, Shepard used the AP image as a referance for his piece he didnt steal anything, Artist do this all the time, they incorparate their ideas into a piece of work that they have seen before to make it their own. Its progressive to alter art, It allows others to view a different persons ideas. I have seen Exit Through the Gift Shop and its not just about "ingenuine street art" its about finding your own in the street art world, doing it because you. . .

[kiinux]

Shepard is wrong. Using other people's exact work in your own piece is not art. It's one thing to create your own interpretation of someone elses work but to just throw someone elses hard labored art into your own piece and claiming the whole thing as yours is not acceptable.

Shepard just creates collages courtesy of other people. I would recommend anyone to see the movie exit through the gift shop. It shows how ingenuine street art really is.

[5000Five]

How much does the AP pay Obama for every photo they take of him? Press and Art must remain free. The AP, in trying to remain relevant, just proved how irrelevant they are.

[Skandalus]

@estvm where's the guy that originally made it

[Skandalus]

@Gingernova  how

[h204lyf]

OBEY to be FREE

[estvm]

I'm not sure copyrights and intellectual property could be considered de minimis issues.