Rebel Yell Repeat.

Shepard Fairey, the guerrilla artist who gained his high status in the art world for the creation of Obama's campaign poster, has moved away from illegal guerrilla strikes on the streets and into galleries and department store displays. Fairey has begun his permanent movement into the notable art world by designing a shopping bag for Saks Fifth Avenue, as well as his first museum retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Fairey has stayed faithful to his recycled imagery, bold words, and use of reds, blacks, and off-whites in his artwork, providing legibility integrated with vertiginous complexity.

Despite the initial impact that Fairey's work douses on the viewer, a feeling of dismay surpasses this primary rousing excitement, for his work leaves the viewer with a sense of devolution from a certain avant-garde dream into a kind of visual easy listening for the college-educated masses. His initial experimental imagery was successful when he first entered the scene, but truthfully, there is no reason for new, surprising reactions from critics and viewers alike. Fairey's method utilizes images and words that catch the public's attention, but strays from the propaganda of the media, delivering contradictory, menacing messages. This tenor aspires to provide an epiphany about alternative social realities. But Fairey was not the first artist to approach a possible epiphany through recycled imagery and provocative design. Artists such as Adrian Piper, Stephan Kaltenbach, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and most praised, Barbara Kruger, paved the way for this popularity of being subversive through art, which Fairey seems to be cheerfully oblivious and naive too.

While Fairey has indubitably mastered aestheticism for the masses, spawning controversy, his work lacks a personal, less predictable formulaic dimension, leaving his work to simply be a canny illustration of common knowledge.

Fairey's work is worth viewing, but not elevating above the next guerrilla artist.