i guess the obama-as-heath-as-the-joker poster is the talk of the town. now let me say why, as against kennicott et al, i think it is a strong image.

the first thing to notice is precisely that it is the talk of the town; obviously it has power, or it wouldn't suddenly have been reproduced on every website. the shepard fairey thing kind of snuck up on us; this sucker instantaneously...killed, and will as instantaneously dissipate.

potentially, the power of the shepard fairey obama-hope was in its ironies: i personally did not know whether to read it as inspirational or scary, until fairey made clear that his purpose was purely obamania. how the mighty are fallen: fairey's "obey giant" stuff was notable for its combination of semantic repleteness and simplicity: it kept exceeding your grasp; or it seemed completely arbitrary, but somehow it was a political commentary too, bringing into play socialist realism, graffiti, pop art, etc. it was a propaganda poster. but what could it possibly be propaganda for? it was at play in the field of political aesthetics. then fairey imitated his own style without irony. he started marketing "obey" t-shirts at target. he decided to put his pointedly ambiguous art in the service of actual propaganda: really a bizarre re-appropriation, or a kind of paradigm postmodern moment. and you had to read the previous images differently. the "hope" poster sucked the irony retroctively out of the whole oeuvre.

now that poster has itself been re-appropriated, while being injected with a whole new series of contents: the mega-movie batman, eminem's heath ledger bobblehead [our best writer: "I'll do it --pop and gobble it, start wobblin', stumble, hobble, tumble, slip, trip, then I fall in bed with a bottle of meds and a Heath Ledger bobble head"]., etc: the dementia precisely at the heart of establishment entertainment, including politics. but i would hesitate, in the absence of collateral info, to pronounce clearly on the meaning of the poster, or who put it up and why. it could be - as everyone appears to believe - a straightforwardly anti-obama image. but as kennicott points out, if so it works against itself in a variety of ways.

if i do halloween this year as obama in shoepolish blackface, that is a racist incident. but what does it mean to paint obama white? perhaps this comes from the visual shop at the nation of islam. ledger's joker is an emblem of blackbuster derangement. but obama's personality is extremely the opposite. or maybe that's a diabolocal illusion. a false self, like the forged newspaper announcements of his birth? but maybe not. what would we be saying if we portrayed al gore as heathledgerjoker? would we be wishing he were a bit more unpredictable?

what i believe and hope is that this is a street artist or an art student (fairey was at risd when "andre the giant has a posse" started appearing all over the world). our art student intends all the ambiguities, the seemingly arbitrary juxtapositions, all the layers of reference, precisely the excess to interpretation. and he teaches us that the website can be the inheritor of the sticker and stencil.