May 20th, 2010 by Chestykins Posted in Art Scene, Graffiti, New York City, Street Art | No Comments »
Obviously, it is the nature of street art to be impermanent - it is art born of vandalism and it will be vandalized.
In my opinion, however, there's a big difference between contributing to an existing piece, adding to it creatively, or even covering it (creatively) to make way for a new thought or idea, and obnoxiously spraying a bland tag over the entire thing.
People hate Shepard Fairey. They think he's a sell out, they think he's a plagarist, they think he's a hack. Whatever they think, they hate him for it and they're downright giddy when his stuff gets bombed. Sometime in the early morning hours of Sunday, May 15th, Fairey's These Parties Disgust Me mural, which was pasted up over a faux wall on Houston Street at the end of last month, was tagged.
It's not the first time someone has taken aim at the piece - before the pasting was even complete, it had been tagged. A brick was tossed through it and a portion of it was kicked in before the artist's Mayday show opened on May 1st. With Fairey hoping to keep the mural relatively in tact until the show opening, the mural was repaired and cleaned soon after each incident, however, with the month almost over and the show's run coming to an end, the wall is now fair game to taggers and Shep haters alike.
I know why people don't like Shepard Fairey, but I don't really understand it, or the need to purposefully destroy his work. He's a commercial artist now, yes. Absolutely. He makes money, he sells work, and yes, his work is, more often than not, derivative of other people's or a reinterpreation of a photograph. I don't really see it as plagiarism, though. Plagiary, to me, would be him taking someone else's work outright, unaltered, pasting it up and calling it his own - that's really not what this guy does.
Fairey's work has a very definitive style to it. It's a combination of formats and looks and often speaks to an idea that the original work was not intended for. He's not tearing pages out of books and throwing them up on walls, he's creating something new from something existing. All art comes from somewhere or something else. How we see it is, of course, extremely subjective. For example: To me, all tags look generally the same. Bubble letters or graffiti scrawl. Thousands of tags and maybe.... 3-4 styles of actual tag. One could really make the argument that taggers are just copying each other over and over again and just swapping out names. It's not very artistic. It's nothing new or interesting. It doesn't take much thought.
The Mayday mural was a nice piece. Fairey himself said that he hoped it would remain there for some time and become a collaborative work, which could have been really cool. Throwing a huge, nasty looking tag over it, though... I just don't see the point, the artistry, or the statement in that. I could ramble about this for a long time, and I won't even get into what happened to the four NYC Banksy's, but my main point is mostly that it sucks to see something destroyed out of spite. Let it go, people.
