Obey the Plagiarist...?

There is an interesting article on Shepard Fairey claimng that he is nothing but a bad plagiarist. I am not sure that one can discredit 20+ years (yes, that's right: the first Andre the Giant stickers appeared in 1986) of hard work on the basis that:

Obey "imagery appears as though it’s xeroxed or run through some computer graphics program; that is to say, it is machine art that any second-rate art student could produce."

That is a silly argument IMO. Nevertheless it is an interesting read.


Later update: JustSeeds.Org has a lot more thought provoking take on the issue. Fairey is probably more of a marketing person than an artist...



The reason I am interested is that lads of OBEY posters came up around Old Street and Hoxton just before Christmas. I later found out that Shepard Fairey was doing a couple of walls in Cargo in East London. There are a few more OBEY pics in my Flickr Streetart set.