New Yorker critic doesn’t believe in Obama poster artist Fairey

Shepard Fairey, designer of the crazy-popular Obama “Hope” poster, gets his comeuppance in a dressing-down by Minnesota-raised and Carleton College-educated art critic Peter Schjeldahl in the current New Yorker magazine. Schjeldahl loves the famous poster — a “splendid tour de force for Obama [that] anticipated a new national mood, of serious-minded pragmatism” – but finds the rest of Fairey’s work, now on view at the artist’s first retrospective exhibit (which opened Feb. 6 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston) to be so much warmed-over Warhol.

Fairey’s “a terrific designer,” Schjeldahl concedes, often exploiting (as in the Obama image)

… 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. Mentally restoring those splotches to rounded substance makes us feel clever, on the important condition that the subject excites us enough to elicit the effort.

But beyond that singular image (which breaks from the usual Fairey color scheme), the artist’s overall oeuvre is “formulaic” in its revolutionary pretentions, Schjeldahl wries. So much so that it’s

… strangely wholesome, like a vaccine that defeats the virus it imitates. It’s as if Fairey meant to ridicule rebellion. I’m not sure he knows what he meant, beyond wanting to get a rise out of people. But if he did know—that is, if he were a better artist—he probably could not have helped change the world with one magically ambiguous picture.

Schjeldahl has a propensity for pricking overhype where he perceives it. A recent example came when he took Chicago, widely assumed to be the art capital of his native Midwest, down a peg when he pronounced it  “a receptor city” rather than the art-world generator it pretends to be.

Here are a couple of other tidbits of interest from the review. It seems even as he gains institutional recognition, Fairey’s street art is helping him keep his rap sheet current, since

… of course, it’s vandalism—in the vein of urban graffiti—invading environments whose inhabitants, for all any artist knows, might value them just as they are. Boston’s I.C.A. has condoned a citywide smattering of street art by Fairey, as an extension of the show. That makes sense. So does the decision of the Boston police to arrest him for it, on his way to the show’s opening.

Also, Obama’s cocked-head pose, as originally captured in an Associated Press photo that Fairey appropriated for his poster, probably isn’t the indication of  deep contemplation it seems to be. The poster’s (Brown)backstory:

The original shows Obama seated at a dais (next to George Clooney) at the National Press Club, in 2006, and attending to a speaker who stands outside the frame, to his left. Knowing this rather deflates the mystery of an expression that has suggested, to some, a visionary surveying the future. Obama listens, merely, with a grimly amused concentration that may be explained by the identity of the speaker, the conservative Senator Sam Brownback, of Kansas.