unanswered questions

Do the echoes of agitprop help or hurt Barack Obama?

Meghan Daum examines the issues:

Fairey told me he thinks it’s solely his use of red that makes some people uneasy. I’m not so sure. He’s an artist; his adoption of propaganda tools — the graphic style, the underground distribution, and, OK, the color red — is at least in part ironic, a comment on political-machine communiques, a subversion of them. Although, let’s be honest, most people don’t look at the world through the meta-tinted glasses that this genre of art requires. They may get a whiff of critique, but what if they get a stronger whiff of something they can’t quite identify? And what if that confusion leads to some form of heebie-jeebies when it comes to Obama?

Still, the most radical aspect of this whole phenomenon is not the artwork itself but how it conveys Obama’s sharp divergence from the generic, easily digestible cultural coding that’s always been associated with getting elected. As Fairey says, Obama has “radical cachet.”

But if you like Obama and you’d like to see him elected president, it’s worth asking yourself exactly why none of the other candidates has dipped an ironic toe into agitprop, and whether their freedom from images that conjure mass idol worship, however archly, might not help them in the end. [e.a.]

One of those images was mounted on a fence around the corner from my polling place. It creeped me out—because I know agitprop, and I didn’t like it associated with Obama: it was a huge turnoff.

Daum claims there’s Hillary merchandise too, so:

It’s all commodity. As a result, no one’s commenting.

Maybe. For now. But things change.