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The executive director of the Fair Use Project, Anthony Falzone, talked to the Chicago Tribune about a controversial poster that depicts President Obama as "the joker" from the Batman movie The Dark Knight. The depiction is based on an image of Obama that appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. The Fair Use Project represents Shepard Fairey creator of the Obama "hope" poster. The Tribune reported:
Here's what Firas Alkhateeb of Portage Park did on his summer vacation: He became the center of a media typhoon. He was held responsible for a potent piece of artistic appropriation. He was discussed seriously by art critics in the Washington Post and pundits on CNN, defended by the right on Fox News and dubbed racist by the left in LA Weekly. The Los Angeles Times wondered if he had created an "act of cultural terrorism," even as others rushed to use his art on T-shirts, clocks, action figures. He was both praised and criticized by Shepard Fairey, the artist best known for those ubiquitous Barack Obama "Hope" posters. Meanwhile, Alkhateeb's own art became somewhat ubiquitous across Los Angeles and surrounding towns, disseminating outward, and surfacing on mailboxes and telephone poles as far away as Florida, Minnesota and Hawaii.
A busy summer, considering Alkhateeb found out about all this only two weeks ago.
See, earlier this summer someone began blanketing Southern California with posters portraying Obama as the Joker from "The Dark Knight" -- a portrait identical to an October 2008 cover of Time magazine but caked with pasty white makeup, and darkened ominously around the eyes, then smeared with Heath Ledger's long gruesome lipstick grin. Beneath the image, the poster read simply: "socialism." It got noticed. And discussed.
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But Anthony Falzone, the executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School, and the defending attorney for Fairey in his own appropriation controversy against The Associated Press (which says Fairey unfairly used one of its photos for his "Hope" posters), said Alkhateeb's image is "pretty brilliant, because people have attached so many meanings to it -- which is a hallmark to great art. It says different things to different people. And to recontextualize it as guerrilla art, and for it to be the Joker, whose targets were political in the movie -- it's pretty ingenious no matter how you feel about it."