Word: symbolizes
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...peaceniks don't buy it. To them, Sharon embodies the old expansionist Israel of settlements and the Lebanon war. For Palestinians, he's a symbol of the slaughter that befell them at the hands of Israel's Lebanese Christian militia allies in the Sabra and Shatila refugee area near Beirut. The official government report found that Sharon as Defense Minister had "indirect responsibility" for the massacres, and that event remains an essential part of the Arab vision of him.* "For us," says Ziad Abu Amr, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council from Gaza, "he could never be anything except...
...simple. By virtue of its idiosyncrasies (and well-targeted vandalisms of certain billboards), the Giant campaign has become a token of solidarity among those dissatisfied with modern pop culture. It is, of course, ironic that a symbol of nothing could become so quickly a symbol of symbolizing nothing...
...symbol is entirely arbitrary. For the record, Andre the Giant, born Andre Rene Roussimoff in France, stood 7'4" and over 500 lbs. Besides a laudable wrestling career, he also starred in such memorable roles as Fezzik in "The Princess Bride." A man of few words, his size, novelty, and appearance in cult films nevertheless made him a cult figure. The idea of a posse was borrowed from the skateboarding culture Fairey was active in at the time...
Neither of these facts alone, however--neither Andre's iconic status nor the posse's street cred--can account for the symbol's tremendous, explosive success. Paper magazine senior editor Carlo McCormack recently explained to Salon that "[Fairey]'s really tapped into something. People, without even understanding phenomenology, get in on this elaborate joke of putting out this empty signifier...
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the symbol's growth is that, in an age of electronic proliferation, Andre's playground is not the Internet. Instead, it's the old walls, billboards and utility boxes of ordinary physical cities. The viral proliferation usually associated with chain e-mails is instead a visual play of images in three dimensions--a rare phenomenon if only for the simple reason that paths cross much more often electronically than they do across the world. Postering the world to get a message out is, as most student groups have found, much more difficult and erratic...