Saks Fifth Avenue Fairey's Advertising Campaign

656 Words2 Pages

In 2009, the major retailer Saks Fifth Avenue enlisted Fairey to design paraphernalia in his classic parody propaganda art for their revitalising campaign (figure). Fairey deliberately uses the codes of anti-consumerist socialist art which are directly yet playfully about marketing consumerism. The language of capitalist critique is playfully coded into commercial campaigns in Russian Constructivist style, which was once viewed upon in its society as illegal as street art currently (www.visual-arts-cork.com). Regarding this case, Wilson (2009) highlights Saks’ marketing team told the NY Times, “What we do every day, really, is propaganda.” This stance reflects the employment of Fairey was not to siphon street art qualities, of irreverent hipness, …show more content…

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Lastly, I will discuss the most significant instalment of Fairey’s career, the 2008 Obama HOPE campaign. This work infused visual styles of street art into a traditional sector of advertising aesthetic, political campaign posters – and consequently created a new kind of cultural aesthetic. As a result of this creativity,
The HOPE poster uses many conventions of U.S poltical advocacy, for example, deploying the cliché of celebrity pose and political affirmation in its image of a leader looking off toward an imagined horizon. Yet the poster effectively recodes its political discourse in a way that aims to interpolate viewers who are adept at reading style as a form of reference. U.S political aesthetics were within the realm of kitsch, for example, George Bushs’ “cowboy kitsch” – Fairey’s accomplishment in creating a poster that exemplifies a contemporary postmodern aesthetic of pastiche was not remarkable in the context of street postering and branding, however, its movement into the more conventional political context was. The play between validating mainstream politics and policy while simultaneously using art to ask questions about those politics and policy is a hallmark of Fairey’s work. From the original campaign to versions of the poster produced by Time Magazine, the National Portrait Gallery and Rolling Stone magazine. (Banet-Weiser &

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