One evening in February 2009, the artist Shepard Fairey spoke at the New York Public Library. He was discussing his famous silkscreen poster Hope, which bore Barack Obama’s face, shadowed by swirling red and blue patterns. At the event, Fairey sat with legs akimbo, artfully slouched before the gilded, packed room, still retaining his old skate-punk persona. Speaking in a skater’s staccato pidgin, he said he was “stoked” about the poster and had “diligently perpetuated” the image on his own dime, putting it up on Facebook and MySpace and e-mailing it far and wide.

Fairey had been an haute graffiti artist for two decades. He borrowed from existing images in order to create silkscreens that mocked American corporate culture or extolled rock stars. He plastered these images across cities and towns, in what could be called anti-advertising advertising campaigns, testing the boundary between thievery and homage. All in all, he was pretty appealing, with his tufts of hair, drolly subversive demeanor, and images-must-be-free stance. I found myself nodding along as he spoke that night, in discussion with that chic legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, a founding father of “free culture.”

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