After making his first stop to our country as the incumbent Pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI flew back to Rome on Sunday which was incidentally the day before I made my own journey to Italy. I couldn’t help but think about how random it was that as I’m making my first trip to the center of Western civilization, the Pope of all people was concluding his trip to the center of the downfall of Western civilization. With that in mind, I wanted to show you this Pope print I came across last week. The signed and numbered print (in a limited edition of 666!) is by artist Michael Ian Weinfeld who was commissioned by online New York culturists ANIMAL. This piece of pop cleverly brings together two of the latest crazes to engulf the masses of mainstream America: Pope-passion and Obama-mania. Now if you’re not familiar with what type of Obama madness I’m talking about, look no further than these following sentences to check out Shepard Fairey’s own creation and contribution to the craze.
Shepard, already a master at turning the unknown into the ubiquitous as seen with his “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” stickers amongst others, unleashed his screenprint onto the world during a time when Barack had a very comfortable lead over Hillary somethin’-somethin’ back in late January/early February 2008. With Shepard an art icon among young people and collectors alike and Obama a front runner as the next resident of the White House, what soon followed was unlike anything I had ever seen in terms of people going crazy for a piece of memorabilia. More popular than a Jose Canseco rookie card during his 40/40 year, scarcer than a “Tickle Me Elmo” doll during that one Christmas, the Fairey/Obama prints went on sale on the Obey website for a mere $25 a pop. Needless to say, the 350 signed and numbered “Progress” prints sold out immediately and were just as quickly being sold on ebay for upwards of $2000. And people were buying them. The same thing continued with Shepard’s subsequent release of the “Hope” edition, also limited to 350. And even the “pasters” (which were newsprint versions of the prints, not even signed, and specifically intended to be wheat pasted around cities by street teams) were going for hundreds of dollars on ebay even though they sold for only the $15 shipping cost.
I admit it, I was one of the thousands of art/collector crazed people who kept hitting “refresh” on my browser in the hopes of being one of the select few to buy a print when they went on sale. When that didn’t work out I turned to ebay where I was shocked to see the unreasonable prices but at the same time I was completely unfazed by all the hysteria. Of course this was going to happen. It was the perfect storm. Timely art hand in hand with timely politics was going to equal major commerce, unfortunately it was mainly for people cashing in on their new found poster fortunes. The proceeds from the prints sold on the Obey website went towards funding the broader campaign to spread the word on the streets through free poster and sticker give-aways as well as wheat pasting across the country.
Since the initial craze, the prices for both Obama prints have considerably gone down on ebay. And I mean very considerably, as in “buy it now” prices going for around “only” $400. The commodification of art is nothing new of course, but the way it went down with all the hype surrounding Obama and the flurry of sales raises some questions for me. Does this precedent make it okay for the hysteria to happen again or will artists like Shepard Fairey compromise their established signing and numbering procedures to prevent “art scalpers” from ripping off true fans in the future? And what happens to those prints if Obama is elected president? What happens if Obama is elected president and then is assassinated? Of course it will be the least of our worries, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see those prints on ebay again. Maybe then they’ll be going for $20,000.
To read what Shepard Fairey had to say about it, check his website here: Obey on Obama as well as an interview on Creativity with Shepard on his endorsement of Obama here: Shepard Fairey: Obey Obama
And for a recent article on art in politics in the New York Times check here: The Art of Politics
You can buy the “Pope” prints by Michael Ian Weinfeld on ANIMAL here: Pope print
So after 6 years of warring (yeah, it’s been 6 years. Crazy), it seems as though maybe war really isn’t the answer after all. But you can still make your own surge by heading out to join the 
