by Alex Wells

Shepard Fairey has finally made his third picture. That’s unfair—he has made thousands, including some remarkably pedestrian drawings of his favorite punk rockers — but as a confirmed post-Warholian his real expertise is branding and through that lens the only Faireys that matter to anyone not wholly down the rabbit-hole of his process are his André the Giant, Obama and now his Kamala Harris image.

The André the Giants exhorted us to “Obey”, the Obamas spoke of “Hope”, and now the Harris shouts “Forward”. In this three-act drama we can watch the creativity drain out of the work and be replaced by flat-footed desperation.

Whether or not you bought into its pretensions to a complex cultural critique, anyone alive in New York in the 1990s could attest to the accumulating mystery of the Obey-Giant images. Rising like an increasingly insistent refrain out of the murk, noise and handstyled guitar solos of the general fray of graffiti there was this message—in stickers, on murals, on wheatpasted walls.” Obey—Giant.” Obey André the Giant? Why? Who wanted this? Why was it everywhere? Was this a band? A skateboard? A cult? Was everyone in the know but you? Was I expected to know? All you knew was that who or whatever was responsible managed to get everywhere—to overpasses, subway tunnels, phone booths (remember those?), bar bathrooms. The medium was the message and the message was that however much you got around it had got there first. If you had that feeling, you experienced what you were supposed to be experiencing. There were agents in the cracks between the night, making the world inexplicable when you weren’t looking.

When Fairey, by then a known quantity in a street-art-world which itself was just becoming knowable, took on Obama the main impact of the image was not so much due to the ubiquity of the image but all that was implied by the transition from subterranean murk to mainstream propagandist clarity. It was time, the image cried, for even graffiti artists to stop goofing around in the dark and openly say: let’s have this guy. Let’s have a black president. Whether or not it worked out, the gives and takes of that transition constituted a mystery worth pondering. 2008 was a time when veterans of the ‘90s hipster-irony-mythmaking-branding/anti-branding fog were emerging into a world which had the internet, a device increasingly devoted to the mundanifying of all mysteries. Artists and musicians striking poses to sell themselves were increasingly revealed to be just that. Their origins, successes and influences were mapped with precision by easy-to-Google articles, interviews and infographics. All of this giant stuff, the Hope pictures seemed to say, is less important than climbing out of the thicket of the Bush years. It was hard to argue with. It was, at the time, not utterly childish to imagine a politician not completely disappointing the class of creatives and criminals to which all graffiti legends by definition belong.

And now, with Hope gone, we have Forward. And what is Forward? It is a narrower, clearer claim. Having our first female president–who is also black—will undeniably be a step forward. But we don’t quite dare Hope any more. We can’t pin hopes on a former prosecutor. But the image now seems to say more about the artist than about the prospective president: Fairey is now fully domesticated.

The Hope images felt like a watershed moment where some powerfully charismatic underworld figure–Billy the Kid, or the “Can you dig it?” gang leader from The Warriors—points to the plucky protagonist running for office and goes “This guy is alright with me” to plot-altering roars from the once-divided crowd. The Harris image announce what we already knew: everyone with any genuine creative ambition needs to all be voting the same way, and has been for decades. The situation is awful and uncomplicated enough that the art must be as well.

Image: Posters of Vice President Kamala Harris (designed by artist Shepard Fairey) are seen in Chicago ahead of the Democratic National Convention, Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images