the rise of controversy

Controversy is good for art, but it may be better for the price of art. There's a web site with the funny name of Expresso Beans that tracks the cost of art. Run by volunteers, the site is focused primarily on graphic art and allows one to quickly and easily see how costs fluctuate over time. Or, if you're buying or selling, what a fair price might be for the work.

Take the famous (or infamous) Shepard Fairey/AP HOPE poster. A signed offset print originally sold for $30. Over the last six months, the same poster has been selling for an average price of almost $3,000; a thousand percent return!. That figure is based on 323 transactions from a print run of 600 so many of the 600 have been sold at least once. Looking at the chart, one can see several bumps: a small one when Obama received the Democratic nomination, a larger one when he won the general election, and another bump near the inaguration now sustained by the AP copyright infringement case.

My guess is that the ultimate price of the print is directly related to the size of the settlement.
expresso beans

wow! i didn't even realize that was my photograph

Tom Gralish on the trail of art, propaganda, and copyright infringement.

where did HOPE come from?

Probably more than you need to know about the Shepard Fairey/Obama Hope/AP Manny Garcia controversy but some nice detective work revealed. Has it moved officially to the status of controversy, or has the story about "oh no!, you mean some famous baseball players took steroids?" now supplanted it our collective, celebrity-deficit-disorder minds. Speaking of relevance, or lack thereof, the A-Roid revelations would seem to put the whole one-bong hit wonder Gold Medal performance of Michael Phelps into perspective.

Gralish does reveal interesting tidbits about the story, including how long it took everyone to figure out who took the photograph. Even the photographer, who traveled with Obama during the campaign, and who saw the HOPE image hundreds, if not thousands of times, didn't realize it was based upon his photograph.

warrior ant press claims fair use of shepard fairey use of ap image

Which came first, the image or the appropriated image?

Although the Associated Press may be suing Shepard Fairey over the use of a photographic image in what became the iconic image of 2008 (if not the decade), Warrior Ant Press exerts that work produced by m.o.i. that used Shepard Fairey images based upon the AP photograph clearly falls under fair use. And does so for the following reasons.

One persons trash is another ones treasure. Images used by m.o.i. were either discovered on handbills found in the post-election trash outside of the local Obama headquarters, or in the case of one particular work, in the mail from Move On dot Org. Artists are free to re-purpose physical objects as they see fit. If one owned a Picasso and decided to paint over it and create a new work of art it would no longer be a Picasso. If I called this re-purposing art, it would be so, otherwise it would be defacement.

m.o.i has a long history of appropriation whereby the physicality of the original object is embedded within another, newer, work. This practice doesn't toy with the idea that art is informed by other art, it takes the idea to its literal conclusion. This retains the original intellectual property rights and yet lays a cloak of an entirely new one upon it. To compound the rights issue, the work is then sent to others gratis with an inherently embedded challenge, "who now owns the object? and what will you do with it? keep it as such? re-purpose it? who owns the ideas behind the object?"

Once these objects have left the realm of Warrior Ant Press these decisions become those of the new owners. And should they increase in value, then m.o.i. would receive none of the benefits thus the appropriations are used for financial gain.

Secondly, any work that appropriates an iconic political image based upon a political photograph to create a new work is inherently political. It has to be. Propaganda begets propaganda art begets art about propaganda art. And political expression and art are uniquely guaranteed as a First Amendment right in this country.

Thirdly. The AP photograph in question has largely little meaning unless the propaganda posters follow. Without the propaganda campaign, it's just another of any thousands of photographs taken during the course of the campaign. But once the propaganda posters went viral, the original photograph becomes an incredibly valuable piece. Its value is not diminished by appropriation but rather increased.

Likewise, the use of appropriated images in m.o.i's work has no meaning - unless the public has an understanding of political propagandist images of Obama. Warhol can't make art from a Marilyn Monroe or Jackie Kennedy image unless the public already has bestowed iconic status to these celebrities. m.o.i.'swork seeks to re purpose an iconic image into another form of idolatry. Who's that face on the dollar bill? It's not even close to an engraving; there's no way you can mistake it for a $5 bill. And because the image has been put on the bill, one immediately grasps that it's 'art'. The connections are obvious; thus the work immediately becomes what it seeks to comment on - art and money in politics.

Lastly. And we could go on but let's not and this may the most relevant of all the arguments. The images in m.o.i.'s work aren't even the same ones as originally appeared in the Manny Garcia image. They are images, produced at the request of the Obama campaign, to replace the Manny Garcia image. Given the thousands of time the public had seen the image, the actual gesture no longer mattered. All it took was a red and blue Russian Constructivist image to spring to mind the shibboleths of HOPE, CHANGE, and PROGRESS.

It is art for arts sake, and the sake of politics; all without apology. That the masses are so quick to understand it speaks more to the power of the masses than to the power of the art. You are either with me, or against me. We don't care because we are moving forward whether you wish to or not.

Biggie O. Larger than life and the ultimate player. We get it. Does the AP?

Images, top to bottom. All images and art work by m.o.i., collection of Warrior Ant Press.

1."Presidential portrait for a government office", 2009.
2."Change Cola°", 2008.
3. "new money", 2008.
3."Join the party", 2009.