Obama - Street President

I’m copying an article I wrote for Beautiful Crime here because, well I can and because it’s about digital communication. Please Digg it if you feel so inclined as for once it’s a serious and academic piece rather than some pop tech ramblings and mixed metaphors, which I know you all enjoy:

Never have street art and political activism combined to elect a US President.

That they have now with Barack Obama says a lot about the art, the man and how we communicate.

Shepard Fairey, marries respect with commerce as America’s most recognisable street artist. His Obama series of posters, ‘Progress’ and ‘Hope’ were pasted across America’s cities in the run up to Super Tuesday on February 5th. This wasn’t some sub Warhol camp extravagance, this was forthright, counter culture political activism.

But rather than wry commentary as evinced by the Stop Bush Project, which encouraged people to stop Bush through ‘graffiti, placards, flyers and other spontaneous, ‘guerilla’ means’, Fairey’s propaganda poster campaign was a rallying cry to a mutually exclusive creative community to add their voice and effect real Change.

Fairey’s signed, limited edition print available through his site, sold out in minutes. The collectors saw the dollar value of history or they thought Obama looked good in black and red and gazing into the distance.

The centre right press on both sides of the Atlantic would have you believe followers of street art are a disheveled bunch of pot smoking anarchists. So what if Obama had been made an icon by the master street iconoclast? Anarchists don’t vote, hell they eat voters and barbecue polling booths.

Hell, America is a divided nation, a snug conservative belly with liberal flanks.

Rather than pillory the establishment, street artists have united to further the cult of Obama.

Ron English, Marilyn Monroe Micky Mouse mash-up king and billboard liberator, turned Obama into multi-coloured Dead Pop President Lincoln.

His Gold Abraham Obama sold out in minutes. He erected billboards poking fun at McCain’s age and bedroom ability, with the tag ‘I Wanna Be Erected‘.

On the flipside, lest the overuse of a newly anointed icon give the voters pause for thought, the street art community responds with a downloadable wheat paste of Sarah Palin as a vampire with the title VOTE : FRIGHTENINGPROSPECT.COM.

Street art is inextricably linked with the rise and reliance on digital communication. It doesn’t matter that we don’t walk past a Fairey poster in the Lower Eastside, because we can see it online where’s it’s message is amplified by our all pervasive social networks.

Street art is pure art, message and medium combined to illicit a cerebral reaction. Truly, we are living in momentous times when counter culture and Capitol Hill commerce can combine with such dazzling and creative effect.

If Obama is elected, he will be the first Street President in every sense, by getting people who don’t vote traditionally to turn out for him, by unifying a much maligned, but quietly powerful artistic movement behind his brand of Change politics and by realising, perhaps by chance that to get elected you gotta own the streets.

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