Fairey arrested.

Shepard Fairey, "creator" of the much imitated, and wretch inducing "Obama hope" Warhol rip off poster has been arrested in Boston.

For tagging. He's 38.

I could stop here, since by now we all know the mental age of the most fervent Obama Pods is 16. There isn't much reason to repeat the obvious. The punk trashed other people's property. What a shock.

I read the LA Times blurb on the subway going downtown to get a haircut and it did get me thinking about art. I can't comment on Fairey's body of work as I don't know it and don't care to. But I can riff on that Hope image. It is not art. It is craft. He lifted an image from the AP and, in essence, commented on a public figure via use of colors.

AP is rightfully suing Fairey. There is a myth that many alleged artists perpetuate around "fair use" rules. The biggest being that if a certain percentage of the copyrighted material is changed then it is "new". This is bullshit. If the original work is recognizable in any way it is not fair use. One cannot remove 75% of a Hockney painting, leaving only - say - a young man diving into a pool, add a sketched rabbit, and then claim that Hockney no longer owns the painted image of the young man. I work in film clearances and I can't tell you how many times I've been asked about this.

There are 2 exceptions. If the work is "transformative" - that is putting the original copy righted material is a markedly different context. If I took the AP photo of Obama and placed it in a photo I owned of the La Brea Tar Pits as a "statement" of some sort - I might have a case. But even that is doubtful.

The other exception is parody - which is protected. Fairey's rip off of the AP photo is not transformative. For many of us it is parody, however. But parody was clearly not the intention.

Every time that "hope" poster was sold, Fairey broke the law. In fact, he probably broke it by making it. However, the law evolves on this issue all the time. Please correct me if you know something I do not.

My main beef here is actually about the nonsense that gets passed off as "art". If I can do it with an Iphone and a computer program it is not art - it's commentary or a hobby. And most of it is pollution as well.