Obama n Hillary Communist Fashion

www.TIADaily.com

Commentary by Robert Tracinski

1. Last Century's Fashions

There has been a bit of a buzz going around on the blogs recently about the creepy posters being designed for Barack Obama by various volunteer artists and graphic designers—posters which are invariably described, correctly, as recalling old Soviet propaganda posters. The article linked to below gives an overview of the trend, while the Power Line blog (http://www.powerlineblog....) provides some of the images, along with the comment that this has "a whiff of the totalitarian."

Maybe the whole esthetic ambience of 20th century totalitarianism might explain why Hillary Clinton has clearly been ruminating lately on the topic of political assassination. http://www.nypost.com/sev...

Add to the use of Soviet propaganda art the fact that a giant rally for Obama in Portland was (http://newsbusters.org/bl...) preceded by a free concert by The Decemberists, a rock group that has been known to begin its concerts with (http://www.youtube.com/wa...) the Soviet anthem. (Ironically, the real Decembrists weren't Communists; they were mostly advocates of constitutional monarchy {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decembrists} and representative government, opposed to Czarist absolutism.)

Meanwhile, Clinton's supporters have been getting in on the act with their own neo-Maoist Hillary Clinton poster. http://weblogs.chicagotri...

What I find most interesting about this is that it is not so much an explicit ideological statement but a fashion statement—which is to say that it reflects an implicit sympathy with Marxist-Leninist sense of life. On the left—as demonstrated by decades of college kids hanging posters of Che Guevara in their dorm rooms—Leninism is still considered hip.

Thus, the comments field in the last link above contains a comment from "John" who asserts that "despite your stupid opinion, its [sic] a cool style that reflects youthfulness." The hysterical thing about this is that Communism is, in actual fact, the faded ideology of last century. Rather than being "youthful," it is hopelessly geriatric and passé.

On that same blog post, commenter Mark Daniels hits much closer to the truth: "But this design and the Obama/Che design suggest the cult of the personality, Great Leaps Forward, grim cinder block high rises, and May Day parades, not the image either candidate likely wants to project." I particularly like the part about "grim cinder block high rises," which reflects the real, utterly un-hip sense of life of Communism.

So who is going to break the news to these youngsters, sheltered as they are among the old fuddy-duddies at the universities, that they are wearing last century's fashions?

http://www.weeklystandard...
"Let a Thousand Posters Bloom," Jonathan V. Last, Weekly Standard, May 26

More than any other politician in recent memory, Barack Obama has been the subject of iconography. His campaign's official posters often portray Obama in a beatific light—clad in a white shirt and silver tie, eyes squinting and looking into some middle distance above the camera, a nimbus of wispy clouds illuminating his sacred head. But even away from the Obama mother ship, graphic designers and pop artists have adopted the candidate as their own, producing a raft of posters and prints in support of his campaign.
Last summer, an Obama poster began appearing in downtown Chicago, plastered randomly in public spaces. Drawn in mustardy yellows, Obama appeared from the shoulders up, staring straight at viewers, with a sunburst exploding behind his head. Below the image, in large block letters, the poster proclaimed "The Dream." At the time, the artist was identified only as "CRO," but, as the posters spread, CRO was revealed to be Ray Noland, a 35-year-old graphic artist….

Noland's designs attracted a huge amount of attention in the art community, and even some interest from the Obama campaign. At first, campaign officials asked him to donate his images, according to the New York Post. He declined. But the campaign finally did purchase a poster, which was used as part of the official promotion for a September 2007 rally in New York City.

Shepard Fairey was the next to step forward…. It wasn't until Obama appeared on the scene that Fairey really fell for a candidate. He would later explain that he admired Obama's "radical cachet." "I have made art opposing the Iraq war for several years, and making art of Obama, who opposed the war from the start, is like making art for peace."

In January, he unveiled two posters in support of Obama. Done in blood red and grays, the prints depicted a large, iconic Obama, head thoughtfully cocked. One version of the poster proclaims "HOPE," the other, "PROGRESS." As Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum noted, the Fairey motif was something like "Bolshevik constructivism meets skate-punk graffiti art," all of which suggests that the subject might be "a Third World dictator." But the American Thinker's Peggy Shapiro grasped the poster's more proximate ancestor: Fairey was using "the graphic style of totalitarian Soviet propaganda...[recalling] the idealized portraits and personality cult of the 'Beloved Leader' such as Stalin and Lenin."…

Designer Jean Aw, trying to explain the attraction, told the Huffington Post that "By placing such an emphasis on building a visually appealing brand, Obama is validating the importance of design in communication. This in turn builds support from the design community, who might feel that a design-conscious candidate best represents their personal beliefs."

Of course it is equally possible that artists are responding instead to an ideological kinship with Obama. The Upper Playground is an artist collective in San Francisco….

To support their candidate, Upper Playground has worked with a number of artists (with handles such as "Morning Breath" and "Munk One") to create and sell posters about "the man we have all come to love." Some of the designs have the funky feel of '70s agitprop; some are even more socialist than the Fairey works. In advance of the Texas primary, Upper Playground teamed with an artistic duo called the Date Farmers to create a Spanish language print that portrayed Obama as a cross between an immigrant labor activist and South American dictator. Another collective, known as HVW8, created a work depicting Obama looking eerily like Chairman Mao….

[F]or most of the radical/progressive artists their Obama ministry is a labor of love. The artists believe that Obama really does represent something new in American politics. For the Bolshevik-constructivist, skate-punk crowd, he is the one they've been waiting for.