With respect to the aesthetics, the first thing I thought of was playing card. [Caution: stream of consciousness coming.]
Ace.

Ace in the Hole.
Just the Hole.

With respect to the sentiment, the term “has been” is someone who is past his prime, past his moment of fame and relevancy. Can we coin something for BO? “Has Did?”

“Artistic syncretism” may attribute too much conscious intentionality or intellectual complexity to a mere pastiche, but a pastiche attached to a political-cultural peak experience opens itself up to complex readings.

Fairey may in many regards be just another art school refugee steeped in theory he doesn’t have a prayer of understanding, but able, like many artists, to negotiate his way intuitively through the graphic arts equivalents of received wisdom. I’d guess he perceives himself to be wielding Stalinism vs. corporatism or some such, from within an artistic compound guarded by miles of barbed wire irony. We may think the joke’s on him but the joke’s on us because he knows the joke’s on him so it’s on us again, while just because we know that the joke’s on us doesn’t mean the joke’s really on him because his side won: Scoreboard!

When I interpret a piece like this one, the process is as much contemporary archaeology as art critique. Whether or not the artist had a conscious intention to make this or that other statement is secondary where not irrelevant. Why doing it this way looked cool to him, or why he thought it would look cool to its intended audiences is one beginning point, but competes with other significations likely beyond the control or interest of the artist.

I do think it’s cool, and in certain versions would be more collectible than your average piece of Obamabilia. The difference between what the artist and the Obamanaut intended and what may be understood from it regardless of their intentions is what opens up the space for a blog post.

Zoltan Newberry wrote:
Rand came to my campus in 1960 all dressed in black, smoking with the help of a long ivory cigarette holder, surrounded by humorless young women in black turtlenecks and black shawls and long black skirts and black leotards all smoking with the help of cigarette holders.

As Paris Hilton might say: That sounds hawt!

@ Seth Halpern:

For sure he would have had to be a lot more disciplined if Beria’s boyos were reporting back on everything being done in his studio.

Sully, well, we try to be genteel, if not necessarily gentile.

As for the artwork, I find it kitschy as well as fishy, and for that reason wonder if the artist’s sensibility might not eventually have led to his being denounced and shot as a counter revolutionary..

@ Seth Halpern:

Seth,
When in discussion with me you never have to be concerned about giving inadvertent offense, or even advertent offense. In the first case I make it a practice to never react based on first read when in discussion with someone like you or J.E. or CK or others here who can correctly use phrases like “artistic syncretism” or “Freudian faux pas” from actual knowledge without googling to check on the meaning of “syncretism” when used with “artistic,” for example. In the second I like being artfully and subtly slapped when I realize it’s happened.

For your side you should never assume I mean to offend if I use a phrase like that because it’s altogether possible, indeed probable, that I simply liked the flavor and texture of the word or phrase when it popped into my head and used it based on “understanding” that stemmed from skimming scholarly stuff or a novel, combined with (very) thin remembrances of the meaning of the roots of the word sort of learned in high school Latin, French and German classes.

Based on my observation, I’m more like fuster than I am like the rest of you folks in that regard. Which is why I like fuster despite disagreeing with him on almost everything. A case of mischievous kids playing amidst the grownups.

@ CK MacLeod:

I saved it and then was able to enlarge it. It is BHO’s silhouette, based on the ears. And it is a modern crowd, based on people holding up small cameras. But now I don’t think it’s a real crowd but rather a collage of heads from crowd pictures, or else a crowd picture that was taken with a lens that made it look more dense. The heads are too closely packed together.

This guy Shepard Fairey would have been valued and kept busy designing propaganda in any of the 20th Century totalitarian regimes. See his corpus (a very apt word) of work here:

http://obeygiant.com/archives

He uses that big brother face in the star image that says “I’m watching you,” in both anti-totalitarian and outright fawning socialist realism images. I’m surprised, although maybe I shouldn’t be, that moveon didn’t get more flack for using this guy at all. Very creepy stuff. After looking over the rest of his stuff I honestly don’t know whether Fairey came to bury Caesar or to praise him when he took on the commission for this poster.

I suggest that Howard do BHO as the commisar in Doctor Zhivago with that face in the star as the badge in the center of his fur hat.

Now, on to Ayn Rand. I tend to agree with J.E. that Rand was a reaction to the totalitarian outbreak, and with CK that she was totally necessary as a popular counter to that outbreak. I’ve read the counter-Rand stuff in National Review and think I understand the argument; but I think that argument was only possible in a world where Rand had made tens of millions of impressions favorable to the anti-totalitarian position with her novels.

You guys are giving this fellow an awful lot of credit for conscious artistic syncretism, aren’t you?

Btw, Sully, I think your response to my Freudian faux pas should be, “If you think my link looks funny, you should see fuster’s.”

Rand came to my campus in 1960 all dressed in black, smoking with the help of a long ivory cigarette holder, surrounded by humorless young women in black turtlenecks and black shawls and long black skirts and black leotards all smoking with the help of cigarette holders.