The Obama poster represents a significant departure in tone for Fairey. “Street art is made in anger,” he says. “You’re supposed to be against everything. Even in 2004, the statement was anti-Bush, not pro-Kerry. The Obama image is the opposite, and it’s refreshing to create something out of inspiration.” This is a far different political mood than the one Fairey was in when he voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. “It feels like some kind of coup that Obama is even running for president.”

Since Fairey’s image first appeared last February, Obama has lost a little luster. Supporters on the left felt betrayed by his apparent move toward the center once the general campaign started. “I’m not too excited about this wiretapping thing myself,” Fairey says about Obama’s mid-June compromise on a Senate bill that would provide immunity to telecommunications companies that assist in government surveillance. “That’s a big controversy.”

Fairey has met controversy as well, stemming from his hugely successful commercial empire, including “Obey” clothing, Swindle magazine, and a design firm called Studio Number One, which translates Fairey’s sharp graphic aesthetic into product marketing campaigns (Absolut), album covers (Queens of the Stone Age), video games (Guitar Hero II), and film posters (Walk the Line). “People say I’m a sellout,” he says, acknowledging the complaint. “They think I’ve somehow abandoned my roots.”

The artist is eager to remind everyone that he still goes out and puts up his work himself, risking jail time, just as always. “I’ve been arrested 13 times,” he offers in a display of bona fides, which includes a range of charges, from malicious destruction of public property to criminal mischief. Fairey still cuts his stencils by hand—yet it is impossible not to notice that his art and the commercial design are produced in the same office, housed in a nice-size building that he owns.

As we’re talking, Fairey is signing hundreds of prints, all of which are already sold. About being tainted by commerce, he offers the Robin Hood defense: “I don’t work for SUV manufacturers, and when I do take money from corporations, I use it to fund ‘Obey’ and give so much other stuff away. I engage the system on my own terms.”

Still, hard-core critics are not convinced. In New York, Fairey’s work, along with that of other street artists, has been systematically defaced by the Splasher, a mysterious detractor (or group of detractors) armed with a xeroxed manifesto and buckets of paint. Fairey accepts the Splasher as inevitable—street artists compete by covering one another’s work—but he’s clearly wounded by the wider chorus of complaints that his art has become toothless. “It hurts my feelings,” he says, “that people don’t recognize that I’m doing my commercial work with the best intentions, in an ethical way, and still making my artistic point.”

This raises a deeper question: whether that’s possible. When rebellion is sold on a well-fitted T-shirt, is it still rebellion? If you follow the argument from Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man to Thomas Frank’s Commodify Your Dissent, the answer is: not likely. Anticipating the ’60s, Marcuse wrote how capitalist consumption erases critical thought by immediately incorporating it into the mainstream. Thirty years later, Frank outlined the precise history of how advertisers neutralized the counterculture by transforming it into marketing tropes and selling it back to itself. If this tragic trajectory turns all mass-produced protest art into the Che Guevara shirt, why should Fairey be an exception?

As someone whose own life was changed by punk-rock T-shirts and record covers, Fairey argues that there is power in a shirt—even the seemingly neutered Ches on sale at gift shops across the country. “To be honest,” he says, “I started with a surface appreciation of hip graphic nature and rebel posturing. But it sparked curiosity and exposed me to substance later.” One of Fairey’s charms is that he still has the unbridled enthusiasm of a dyed-in-the-wool 14-year-old punk-rock convert, and when he realizes that our photographer, Ann Summa, is the same Ann Summa who spent the early ’80s shooting the Germs, Black Flag, X, and other heroes of his, Fairey quizzes her at length. As they enthusiastically discuss the glorious intricacies of a Henry Rollins photo of hers that Fairey happens to own, I realize that his entire approach to “Obey” is conditioned by the experience of being that kid in Charleston for whom punk and skateboarding provided a telescopic view into a larger world. “The medium is the message,” says the artist, citing Marshall McLuhan to suggest that illegally posting stickers is by definition oppositional expression. Stickers and T-shirts gave Fairey a way out before, and so they can today, too.