While we wait for news on the Associated Press / Obama photo lawsuit, Shepard Fairey has been having a by all accounts nice appointed retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The NY Times jumps in this morning with one of the more incisive reviews of his work yet published, finally framing some of the questions that seem to lurk just below the surface. Has his “street cred has been worn out by his all-too-successful commercial ventures” as the Times suggests? Is he “cheerfully oblivious to how his ideas about being subversive through art are fatally familiar?” Times reviewer Ken Johnson doesn’t end up pulling any punches:
“What is missing from his work is a deeper, more personal and therefore less predictably formulaic dimension. Maybe if some such psychological dimension were more consciously integrated, Mr. Fairey’s work would be more like art than like canny illustration of what everyone already knows.”