Perhaps the most surprising thing about the symbol's growth is that, in an age of electronic proliferation, Andre's playground is not the Internet. Instead, it's the old walls, billboards and utility boxes of ordinary physical cities. The viral proliferation usually associated with chain e-mails is instead a visual play of images in three dimensions--a rare phenomenon if only for the simple reason that paths cross much more often electronically than they do across the world. Postering the world to get a message out is, as most student groups have found, much more difficult and erratic than sending an e-mail.
As a result, the phenomenon's success has depended in large part on unreal amounts of dedication from Fairey and company. Fairey himself has spent most of his free time over the past 10 years printing, plastering and running from the law. (This when he's not running a successful graphic design company, BlkMrkt, with clients like Levi's and Sprite.)
This is not the forum to debate Fairey's "acts of vandalism" in defacing billboards or the place of street art vis--vis advertising. My point is simply that a marvel which requires years of effort from thousands of volunteers should be considered as much a marvel of organization as of mimetic contagion. What's curious is simply the sheer amount of will that goes into making a cultural phenomenon: a lesson for seniors who want to change the world.
In light of its cultural-iconic status, the Fairey campaign has been read by some as a manifestation of media guru Marshall McLuhan's notorious judgment that "[a]dvertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century"--that art, in other words, is neither political nor representational so much as transactional and economic.
Against this bleak picture, Andre's face looms with its stylized series of commands: Buy. Obey. The verbs' object is, of course, left blank. In the end, it seems, what we have bought into is not the product or the image at all but the movement--a movement which, ironically, consists exactly of those who have bought into the image. Postmodern cynics might even say we have bought into buying itself. Caveat emptor.
Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.