Who, indeed?!

Some potent questions!

What do you think? Do you think this work is endorsing or criticizing the ideals of the United States? How and why?

Find a little more context and some further thought-provoking queries about this piece of art by Barbara Kruger here.

Creative Psych and Transference

What a wonderful, thought-provoking post, I came across recently courtesy of author Daniel Levitin’s tweet about it. I wish I had the time, insight and wherewithal to write about topics like “The Artist’s Battle Within”

Essay like this fascinate me, and I’ll certainly be paying closer attention to Professor Woody’s work, including his wonderful blog: Being Musical, Being Human.

As for the aforementioned essay in particular, I agree that there are shared traits among creative people regardless of the media in which they work. (Hey, do landscapers get no respect? They’re certainly equal to chefs in my book ... and I’m not dissing chefs). But I’m not sure we’ve seen much evidence that the application of that orientation crosses disciplines all that often. Yes, throughout history, there have been some legitimate “Renaissance” men and women, but not too many Leonardo’s in the writing set as far as I can tell.

Even as someone with at least a rudimentary skill as a wordsmith and some experience as a historian, I’m hard-pressed to name any literary greats who showed a gift for music, and more significantly (especially given modern inclinations) equally few who have made an equitable transference from musician to literati – and it’s not for lack of trying. Perhaps Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen make the cut, but (a) even that’s debatable and (b) they’re in sparse company.

What do you think? What musicians – if any, modern or old – have distinguished themselves as literary lights, too – or vice versa? (And please don’t say Jim Morrison, I’m being serious here.)

Venn Design

This applies to more than just graphic design.

Photoshop Master-Mixing Eye Thriller

Here’s a graphic rap for you:

From CollegeHumor.com

Fairey Haunting

I’m starting to feel like I’m being haunted by graffiti-artist-cum-darling-of-the-art-world Shepard Fairey. A few years back, I would see his mock propaganda “Obey” iconography randomly emblazoned on sidewalks, mailboxes, telephone polls, etc., all around the city, even right outside the door to my office building. Beyond noticing it, I didn’t think much of it at the time and was unaware of its growing notoriety. Fast-forward a few years and Mr. Fairey has miraculously transformed from ubiquitous street artist to iconic political propagandist with his “Hope” poster for the Obama campaign. The next thing you know, one of his stylized, Warholian images of Obama is featured on a Time magazine cover.

Then, in February – in further evidence of the young artist’s ascension from pretentious skate punk to feted member of the wine and cheese crowd – Fairey became the focus of a six-month-long exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. With that, of course, came much fawning coverage in the local press. It didn’t hurt that right around the launch of the exhibit, the local district attorney’s office decided to exercise a several-year-old warrant for Fairey’s arrest on charges stemming from past “public exhibitions” of his work (i.e., prolific tagging of public and private property).

Beyond vaguely noting this increasing ubiquity of all things Fairey, I didn’t think much of – or much about – his art. Then, in April, with a friend in town and a few hours to kill, we decided to visit the new ICA building. It didn’t matter that we weren’t particularly interested in Fairey’s work, the much vaunted, relatively new facility itself was reason enough to wander down to the harborfront. And surely there’d be other stuff on exhibit, too.

There wasn’t. But, as I discovered, there was plenty to check out and even think about in Fairey’s works.

Now I’m no art critic, but after scrutinizing this extensive exhibit of Fairey’s art, including some of the biggest pieces I’ve seen in an exhibition (massive, wall-size canvases) I began to see some merit to his work. As derivative as it is – of Warhol, old Soviet- and Maoist-style propaganda and various mixed collage techniques – there’s also some originality in the stylizing and collaging, and most significantly in the wit and subversive juxtapositions.

I enjoyed watching a video interview in which Fairey talked about the art of graffiti and his efforts to keep his street cred as he navigates his way through the more high-falutin’ echelons of the art world. He explained his ongoing motivations for public “culture jamming” (the appropriation of public and commercial spaces for anti-commercial graffiti) to counter the fact that so many of our public spaces (or seemingly public spaces; i.e., in our sightlines even if on private property) are now used to inundate us with commercial messages. I liked the independence and subversiveness of his thought, though I’ll admit to likely feeling different about it if he was tagging my house!

Working my way through the extensive exhibition, I turned a corner and, amid a section of music-related images (rebel icons such as Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer,  Henry Rollins, Tupac, et al,), I discovered a piece that was used as the cover  of the most recent Led Zeppelin greatest hits collection, Mothership. As a big Zeppelin fan, this immediately drew my attention. At first I thought, “Is this some kind of a takeoff on the cover?” The band doesn’t quite fit in with most of the other pop icons he paid tribute to, and I had never heard elsewhere that Fairey had created this album cover – with his new celebrity status, you’d think this would have been mentioned somewhere. I inspected the piece closely. No, this was no hack, he had created the actual album cover. (It’s not really one of my favorite covers, but nonetheless …)

Another heretofore unknown association … and there was more to come. About a month ago, my eighth-grader was doing a book report that involved a posterboard component (doesn’t everything?) with  a large hand-drawn rendering of the selected book’s cover. My daughter chose George Orwell’s 1984. She put a lot of effort into her report and especially her poster, spending hours hovering over it on the kitchen table. We were all very impressed with her final work – as was the teacher.

Then, a few days ago, what should I stumble across on the Web but the image of the 1984 cover that my daughter had so meticulously hand-copied. Only, unlike the black-and-white photocopy she had worked from and rendered in bright blues and greens, this one was in a familiar black, beige and muted red. Suddenly, I realized it looked very much like something by … you guessed it! It too was a Shepard Fairey creation. He had designed the cover she had replicated.

Wow, I thought, this is starting to get a little … I don’t know, eerie? What’s next? Will I find out that, unbeknownst to me, he designed the art for some magazine piece I oversaw  years ago? Who knows? After all, Shepard Fairey is everywhere.