Lots of people out there are still trying to get their hands on one of those Obama “Hope” posters. This weekend, the artist who makes them, Shepard Fairey, told us why he’s not selling them anymore on his Website. “I just sold as many posters as I needed to keep making more posters,” he said Saturday night at the Mondrian South Beach, after a day visiting fairs at Miami Art Basel. “If I kept selling the posters, the Internet chatter would have been, ‘Oh, well Shepard Fairey’s just trying to cash in on this Obama thing,’ even if there were text right below that says all the money goes to making more stuff. People are so lazy, and I’m disappointed by it. But [I wanted] to make sure that I wasn’t encouraging those types of rumors.”
As a result, eBay profiteers have got the market cornered for the moment. But there’s still, um, hope. “Who knows, there may be a cause that pops out that I decide it’s worth printing another run to use the money for,” Fairey suggested. “If they said, ‘We need $20,000 to hire this attorney that’s going to win the case to overturn Prop 8,’ I’d be like, ‘Okay, we’ll make that happen.’ Of course, there’s probably a very wealthy homosexual in Hollywood that would come up with the money anyway. But you understand what I’m saying.”
