Shepard Fairey Gives Sellouts A Bad Name

Shepard Fairey, darling of the hipster class and those who prefer personality cults to actual politics, has somehow managed to defecate on political art and design even more than he has already. He's designing a Saks Fifth Avenue campaign on the backs of the radical designers of the Russian Revolution.
Quoth the New York Times:

Saks Fifth Avenue, which has surely felt the recession’s sting, is taking just such a fist-raising stand with its spring marketing. The campaign is inspired by the bold graphic designs and propaganda spirit of Constructivist art — although it is intended to be tongue-in-cheek.

The store hired Shepard Fairey, the artist who created the stylized Hope poster of Barack Obama that became one of the most highly visible, though unofficial, images of the presidential campaign, to design its catalog covers and shopping bags. They bear a rather unsubtle allusion to advertisements made in the 1920s for state-run department stores in the Soviet Union.

Fairey has always taken the radical/revolutionary art of others, decontextualized it, and repackaged it as his own. There is very little reason I can find to not consider him an apolitical hack. Mark Vallen's "Art for a Change" site has a nice rundown of some of his more infamous examples (definitely check it out).

And it's not like it's actually really-well-known bits of art, which people would "get" that he's riffing off (e.g. the Che face, or even Lissitzky's "Red Wedge"). His design fodder is mainly the more obscure stuff, which smacks of wanting people to assume the work is entirely his.

It'd be some consolation if he actually shared a shred of the political ideals and courage found in those he swipes from, but as I've looked closer at Shepard Fairey, this Saks contract is just par for the course. Any "intentions" (which, some apologists will claim, are actually very clever and subversive) behind his designs are utterly irrelevant to what he's actually doing; like the child who does his homework "because I want to, not because you told me to," the effect is the same. In this case it is moving products on behalf of the super-rich.

In the end, the best indictment is provided by Fairey himself (emphasis mine):

“Some people might think it could be making fun of what’s going on right now,” Mr. Fairey said. “But I think most people are sophisticated enough to realize it’s a way of grabbing attention. It’s commerce. I don’t think there is really any political statement embedded in this.”

Sorry Mr. Shepard, it is a political statement. You are what the Situationists would call a "recuperator" — someone who takes the radical and puts it in the service of reaction.