While renowned artist Shepard Fairey was being feted around Boston in recent weeks, posing for pictures with Mayor Thomas M. Menino and preparing for his big opening night at the ICA, neighborhood groups around the city were seething.

In the days leading up to Friday night's opening, Boston Detective Bill Kelley said, he was getting more and more complaints from residents of the Back Bay, the North End, and Mission Hill, furious that a man who admitted to spreading graffiti - even bragged about it - was being treated like a celebrity instead of a criminal.

On Friday night, Kelley ended a stakeout by pulling Fairey's taxicab to the side of a Boston street and arresting him on an outstanding warrant on an old graffiti charge from 2000 as the artist was on his way to the Institute of Contemporary Art in South Boston.

The arrest and its timing, combined with Fairey's rise from counterculture icon to mainstream celebrity, have exposed anew some of Boston's oldest contradictions - between convention and revolution, between propriety and creativity, between the old order of places like the Back Bay and the new-moneyed donors to the ICA.

In its wake, it has left two unanswered questions: What is crime and what is art?

"At the end of the day . . . he was arrested like any other graffiti vandal," Kelley said in a telephone interview.

Fairey, who at 38 has become prominent for his "Hope" image of President Obama, spent most of yesterday shuttling between courthouses in Brighton and Boston, responding to the outstanding warrant from 2000 and charges that he had posted one of his trademark images on Massachusetts Turnpike Authority property at Massachusetts Avenue and Newbury Street on or about Jan. 24. An affidavit filed in court accuses Fairey of committing at least five additional acts of vandalism over the past several years. Kelley, who has been investigating graffiti-related crimes since 1997, said at least two of them occurred within the past two weeks.

The charges carry a maximum sentence of two years in a county correctional facility, fines, and loss of a driver's license for a year.

Since his black and white "Obey Giant" stencils - based on images of professional wrestler Andre the Giant - began appearing on buildings and overpasses around the country about two decades ago, Fairey's work has often brought him in conflict with the law. He told the Globe recently that he has been arrested 14 times. In recent months, however, the artist has achieved a more mainstream type of fame, with his "Hope" image now displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and his work featured in a six-month exhibit at the ICA.

In a statement, the ICA called the charges an "unfortunate distraction from a meaningful encounter with Fairey's art and ideas and Boston's revolutionary spirit.

"Record numbers of people have responded enthusiastically to the beauty and power of Shepard Fairey's exhibition," the statement read. The museum did not respond to the Globe's request for specific attendance numbers for the show, which will run through August.

While some see Fairey's street work as an uplifting expression of progress and change, others see little to admire, equating it with any other type of graffiti. By imposing his work where it does not belong, they say, Fairey is no better than a delinquent spraying vulgar expressions on the side of a building.

"I'm sure a lot of people look at these charges and consider them kind of trivial, but this is not a trivial issue," said Anne Swanson, who cochairs the Graffiti NABBers for the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay. "Here we spend $1 million a year cleaning up the mess that thousands of people leave behind and we're supposed to pretend this is a higher level art form. . . . The stuff we're removing doesn't appear to be art. It's just pure vandalism."

Fairey was released on personal recognizance after pleading not guilty to the charges. Following his arraignment, he stood outside Roxbury Municipal Court, flanked by four ICA representatives.

"I'm making art that not everybody likes," Fairey said.

He said the arrest was timed "in a way that was designed to create as much inconvenience for me and the museum as possible."

But Kelley said if that were his goal, he would have arrested Fairey inside the museum, before the more than 750 people who had gathered to see him. The point, he said, was to arrest an elusive scofflaw who had used different Social Security numbers and aliases to avoid capture.

"Ultimately who do I work for? I work for the community," Kelley said. "At the end of the day, we answer to the people. We ask these people to report the new graffiti crimes, document the graffiti crimes, then we're going to turn our back on them because a special interest group decides he's someone they're going to host?"

Kelley said he went after Fairey that night because it was a scheduled event they knew he was certain to attend. If Kelley had been aware of the Menino event on Feb. 4, he said, he would have arrested Fairey there.

In his affidavit, Kelley described Fairey as a relentless vandal who failed to show up to court after he was arrested in Brighton in 2000, accused of posting one of his trademark images, known as a tag, in Allston. That offense carries a $100 fine.

Kelley said he found out about the warrant soon after neighbors began e-mailing him with complaints about the exhibit about two weeks ago.

Spurred by their concerns, Kelley said he kept investigating and learned that Fairey was probably responsible for several tags around the city, including one on the Boston University bridge. Around the same time, Menino hosted Fairey at City Hall, where a banner advertising the exhibit was raised.

Menino declined to be interviewed yesterday, but his spokeswoman, Dot Joyce, said the mayor did not know Fairey had a warrant pending.

"I think [Menino] knew that [Fairey] was a bit edgy, but I don't think he ever thought he was doing anything illegal," Joyce said.

The Associated Press has accused Fairey of using a copyrighted photo to create the "Hope" image of Obama. Fairey said yesterday that he has filed a preemptive suit in federal court in New York.

"They are suppressing an artist's freedom of transformative expression," Fairey said.

Yesterday, Fairey shrugged when asked if he thought his latest arrest would mean good publicity for his show.

Swanson said she has no doubt that Fairey will use the arrest to "market" his art.

"To pretend that he's the victim is just absolute nonsense," she said. "We are the victims and we're tired of it."

Boston Globe

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