If you want your wheatpasted poster to last in Berlin, you have to come correct. In a city whose name is synonymous with design at the bleeding edge, an ad campaign needs to show both political and artistic acumen to stand tall. Barack Obama knows that, if the German-language print ad in advance of his highly anticipated July 24 (24 Juli) speech is any indication. Half of Obama's vector-shaded mug appears amid a backdrop of hip, sans-serif diagonals that might at a glance be posting notice of a Werner Herzog retrospective. One small stamp, the familiar Obama ring logo, serves as the only connection to the type of political advertisement that's common in America: symbols with equal doses of red, white, and blue. Which, by global standards, mark the States as mired in aesthetic recession.
Another politician knew from design, too, says Melissa Clouthier: Adolph Hitler.
Borrowing a page from Jonah Goldberg, Clouthier juxtaposes Obama's poster alongside an old print image of Hitler (under the transnationalist-baiting headline, "Barack Obama Hosts German Campaign Stop for World Presidency"). Josh Marshall cherrypicked a user-submittted, unofficial McCain poster in response; even Matthew Yglesias, justly scoffing at Clouthier's gross violation of Godwin's Law, observes, "If I were to engage in guilt-by-association grounded in Obama campaign iconography, I would probably have observed that his campaign aesthetics seem to have something in common with socialist realism."
No doubt, photography and printcraft conspired to make design an accessible tool for fascists, socialists, and ideologues at a time when circumstances gave them power. As Jane Portal writes in the introduction to her survey, Art Under Control in North Korea, "Nations have always requisitioned and utilized artworks. If anything, this process proliferated in the twentieth century, when art was widely adopted for propaganda purposes and those who produced it were strictly controlled by totalitarian states." That final clause is critical: Art is controlled when it is produced by the state to the exclusion of contrary artworks. Under Nazi Germany, art disapproved by the state was called Entartete. An entire generation of Soviet dissident artists showed their work in secret apartment gatherings, to the point that almost all non–Socialist Realist work came to be known as Apt Art.
In the absence of control, graphic art that employs elements—such as diagonals or positive light or faces—hardly achieves propaganda in any meaningful sense, much less fascism. By the principles of design, something like Obama's poster is simply correct. On the other hand, something like Obama's Seal is more worrisome, because it's, well, tacky, and also emblematic of America's low tolerance for meritable graphic imagery in the public sphere.
We have in our own times a fine example of state-controlled art. In 2003, U.S. military and psyops officials orchestrated the destruction of a statue of Saddam Hussein—to be replaced by the iconic, widely disseminated, and patently staged media images of Iraqis cheering. Mission accomplished. In 2008, print posters as propaganda don't cut it.