The Rich Can Buy Soap: Why I Find Shepard Fairey's Hope Poster Problematic

Shepard Fairey in front of his portrait of Barack Obama before its installation 

at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. in 2009

Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

 

 

I. 

 

Someone has emailed:

 

'I was intrigued - and, if I'm honest, slightly irritated - by the fact that after praising Shepard Fairey's Hope poster as a work of art and defending his right to have transformed the original photo by Mannie Garcia on the grounds of fair use, you couldn't resist adding a line in a footnote to the effect that, actually, you didn't much care for the piece after all; branding it as an all-too-blatant example of political propaganda. Would you care to elaborate on this remark?' [1]

Well, although I hadn't planned on saying anything further about Fairey's work, I've decided to take this opportunity to do so, since I was asked in a such a sincere spirit of both intrigue and irritation ...

 

 

II. 

 

Just to be clear from the outset: I'm not suggesting that art should (or could) be pure in some manner or untainted by politics. And lots of great works are explicitly political; Picasso's Guernica (1937) would be an obvious example of such.

 

But I do feel a little uncomfortable when an artist produces a work that is endorsed by a presidential campaign team and which is, in effect, a piece of political advertising that doesn't only promote Barack Obama's candidacy, but attempts to fob us off with the untenable - and treacherous - ideal of hope.

 

One is reminded of something that D. H. Lawrence wrote about advertisements; no matter how clever, how beautiful, or how seductive their use of language and imagery, one can never quite forget they disguise a sharp hook with which to catch the consumer [2]. 

 

I'm not denying, therefore, that Fairey's Obama portrait is a genuine work of art that brings forth a number of powerful reactions, but I don't like feeling that I'm having my reactions pre-determined and manipulated - particularly when Fairey is doing so in a manner that suggests he is attempting to spiritualise politics and sell us not only his version of the American Dream, but inspire mankind with a promise of redemption.  

 

My main problem is not with the instantly iconic image of Barack Obama, heavily stylised by Fairey and displaying many features that belong to his distinctive aesthetic, it's with the slogan HOPE plastered across the bottom in capital letters [3]. 

 

As a pessimistic philosopher, I obviously have problems with this sentimental and morally optimistic ideal of hope. I never expect (nor particularly desire) positive outcomes; I certainly don't pray for such. 

 

Like Schopenhauer, I regard hope as a pernicious delusion or a folly of the heart that undermines the individual's appreciation of probability; like Nietzsche, I suspect the gods enjoy the spectacle of human suffering and so provide hope as a way of prolonging such (it is arguably, therefore, the most evil of all evils). 

I'm glad to see that, by 2015, Shepard Fairey was expressing his disappointment with President Obama and his administration, having lost a good deal of hope as evidence of increased military drone use and domestic surveillance came to light [4].

 

But one wonders just what Fairey - a self-confessed sex pistol - was thinking of back in 2008 by pledging his support of Obama so openly and promoting a theological virtue; had he forgotten the great slogan of punk: No Future ...? [5] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The writer is referring to a post of 4 Feb 2022 entitled 'Notes on Fair Use With Reference to the Case of Shepard Fairey and the Obama Hope Poster' - click here.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 238. I comment further on the poetry and politics of modern advertising with reference to this essay by Lawrence (as well as Roland Barthes's take on the subject in Mythologies) in a post that can be accessed by clicking here. 

[3] Originally, the poster featured the word progress, but the Obama campaign team expressed concerns about the connotations of this idea and advised that the key terms that they were promoting were hope and change.  

[4] See the interview with Fairey by Matt Patches in Esquire (May 28, 2015): click here. 

 

[5] No Future was the original title of 'God Save the Queen', by the Sex Pistols, and the phrase is repeated throughout the song. One might also remind Fairey of something that Sartre once said: 'Voting is not a political act. It's an act of resignation.' Thus one should never vote for anyone or anything, only against.   

Don't Look Now - Because This is the End

Adelina Poerio as the homocidal dwarf in 
Don't Look Now (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

He felt himself held, unable to move, and an impending sense of doom, of tragedy, came upon him. His whole being sagged, as it were, in apathy, and he thought, 'This is the end, there is no escape, no future.'

- Daphne du Maurier, 'Don't Look Now'

 
I suppose we've all felt like that on occasion (if not daily). But from out of such despair great art - including great pop music - is born. Indeed, the last line seems to invoke the 1967 track by The Doors ...


Initially written about a failed romance and the pain of saying goodbye to a loved one, 'The End' evolved into something much more grandiose, to do with the loss of childhood innocence, death, and Oedipal fantasy.

Some critics have described it as Sophoclean. Others have said it's more Joycean in its lyrical playfulness and eclectic frame of reference; that Morrison demonstrates what happens when the stream of consciousness is tainted with acid.

For many people, me included, the song is forever linked with the movie Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), which brilliantly remixed the track from the original master tapes, bringing to the fore Morrison's astonishing vocals (including his liberal use of scat and expletives that are almost inaudible in the '67 recording).

In sum: great tale; great track; great movie. And one can't help wondering what (if anything) Miss du Maurier made of the latter works? I know she liked Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now, based on her short story, but what of The Doors epic and Coppola's masterpiece? I think we should be told ...*

See: Daphne du Maurier, 'Don't Look Now', in Don't Look Now and Other Stories, (Penguin Books, 2006), p. 14.

It's interesting to note that the line quoted also uses the phrase no future, as if anticipating the punk nihilism of the Sex Pistols and not merely recalling the psychedelic nihilism of The Doors. 

Play: The Doors, 'The End', from the album The Doors (Elektra, 1967): click here. And to hear the remixed version used in Apocalypse Now, click here. 

*Although we can't be sure, I doubt that Miss du Maurier would've been a fan of Jim Morrison and The Doors, as a scene in 'Not After Midnight', possibly indicates. The narrator of the tale, Timothy Grey, who is on holiday in Crete, sits outside a café savouring what is known as local colour and amused by the passing crowd; "Greek families taking the air, pretty, self-conscious girls eyeing the youths [...] a bearded Orthodox priest who smoked incessantly at the table next to me [...] and of course the familiar bunch of hippies [...] considerably longer-haired than anybody else, dirtier, and making far more noise. When they switched on a transistor and squatted on the cobbled stones behind me, I felt it was time to move on." See Don't Look Now and Other Stories, p. 73.