Respect Authority

When street culture inevitably becomes mainstream culture, what will be the new underground scene? Gardening, perhaps. Or more likely, reading. Something really uncool, that’s for sure.

By now everyone has seen Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama poster (pictured right), which he created before Super Tuesday as an independent promotion for the rising presidential hopeful (get it?!?!). Its popularity grew faster than even Obama’s, and soon the poster was everywhere.

From street wear and street culture blogs, where Fairey’s work is more typically featured, to mainstream political blogs, and of course, slathered on random buildings across New York’s East Village, the image was almost as pervasive as the general consensus amongst rational human beings that George W. Bush really needed to go the fuck back to his home on Planet of the Apes and stop ruining ours.

Naturally, Obama’s campaign, in its tide-turning understanding of modern marketing, picked up on the poster’s viral success and contacted Fairey to produce two more posters for official use, this time bearing the slogans “Vote” and “Change.” Fairey’s portrait went on to be used on the cover of TIME Magazine’s 2008 Person of the Year issue, and in fact, Fairey was even included as one of GQ’s people of the year. Lucky fuck. Literally no other time in history would this have been possible; for somebody’s work, that would largely be considered vandalism and a form of graffiti by the scowling majority, to not only be positively recognized but then actually utilized by a fucking presidential campaign… well, change really must have come to America.

For one thing, this type of art in general wouldn’t have been appreciated by utterly mainstream, heartland-of-America type audiences eight years ago, let alone considered desirable for a presidential campaign. However, with older generations making way for younger ones, street art at large has been thrust into a more prominent role in advertising of all kinds.

We live in a time when guerrilla marketing can actually be both cheaper and considerably more effective than traditional forms of advertising. Within a media landscape where we are constantly bombarded with familiar logos, slogans, and imagery, street art’s ability to actually draw attention is impressive in its own right. So no shit marketers and corporations are salivating at the thought of getting their teeth into that kind of fresh meat.

It’s self-defeating for a subculture to become successful anyway. The very nature of postmodernism is to assimilate anything cool without regard for its original context, so it’s only a matter of time before any growing subculture is at least partly consumed — we’ve seen this kind of appropriation with skateboarding, punk rock, hip hop and goddamn if this doesn’t say it all, even rave came back for a minute there.

And soon we will see street culture as a whole be swallowed up — when graffiti artists make more money than lawyers and kind-of-skateboarders-but-kind-of-just-alcoholics can build empires in the LES and live like Manhattan socialites without ever graduating high school. If those scenarios sound familiar, you’ll realize we have passed the tipping point. Maybe that’s a good thing. Or maybe there won’t be any honest art forms left.

Indeed, where will the voice of dissent come from when all the dissenters have been converted?