quote of the month

Democracy and Idolatry:

This was no ordinary love. The proof was in the posters—specifically, influential “street artist” Shephard Fairey’s iconic images of Barack Obama, which proved a huge hit at campaign rallies. Rendered in blood red and gray, with his face in silk-screened, Warholian black, the presidential hopeful gazes out toward some distant point, confident and contemplative at once. Only one word was emblazoned across the bottom, in large, block letters: “Hope,” or “Progress.” Fairey describes his work as propaganda engineering and explained that, as a staunch opponent of the Iraq War, making art about Obama, who had spoken out against the war from the start, was for him “like making art for peace.” Peace, however, is not the zeitgeist of this particular graphic style. On the contrary, it recalls Bolshevist propaganda in particular, and Third World revolutionary politics in general; it is power as spectacle, power in whose name millions have been oppressed. As Lisa Wedeen writes in her 1999 study of the cult of Bashar Assad, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria, such idealized, heroic portraits are meant to construct “an original founding moment that signals a new golden age and an end to the miseries of the past.” Judging by the posters raised by the ecstatic masses, the campaign was not just about Obama the Democratic presidential candidate. It was about Obama, America’s long-awaited Beloved Leader.

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