It is not too difficult to discern the shadows of an Oedipal drama swimming below the surface. Here is the baffling, autocratic father represented most powerfully by the image of Andre the Giant (whose positive counterpart is the Good Father Obama). There is the beguiling, possibly dangerous mother embodied in many images of nameless, alluring female warriors. And the son is portrayed in pictures of Joey Ramone, Sid Vicious and other young rebels who would stand in for Mr. Fairey himself and who would depose and replace the Bad Father.

—Ken Johnson, New York Times, 17 Mar., 2009.

Joey Ramone gets a hyperlink while Oedipus, Freud, Bush, and Obama get nada. Also hyperlinked, earlier in the article, are Led Zeppelin and Andy Warhol. I’m seeing a potential trend. Mr. Johnson equates Shepard Fairey with pop, populism, canned “rebellion,” fading and faded fads, and the acquisitive-capitalistic urge to sell la Revolution to the rebels.

This is perhaps a good way to enter into Fairey’s world of late. Andre the Giant, now a motif for thousand-dollar handbags. Like Murakami Takashi, Fairey is enjoying post-indie/post-rebel popularity. He’s spreading his ideas and probably saving a few bucks.

But Mr. Johnson also dismisses Fairey’s art as impersonal and predictable, as if these characteristics are not found throughout the annals of art. The impersonal aside, what is Warhol, what Roy Lichtenstein, if not a little predictable?

My own favorites (Schiele, Dalí, Picasso, Kandinksy, Ernst, Tanguy, Giacometti) are perfectly predictable: If you’ve seen “The Persistence of Memory” (the drippy clocks painting), for example, you can probably identify other Dalís. (Look for ants, lions, clocks, vaginas, burning giraffes, furniture, transfiguring messianic depictions of his wife—all battling it out on the Catalonian waste at eventide.)

My point is simply that predictability is not necessarily the great enemy of art. All art, in a sense, is art-by-formula, even if that formula is “always do something different.” Most artists, as rebellious as they may be, want to be associated with their own work (predicted). They want to be identified with their own “artist”-ness.

Fairey—good or bad, pop sell-out or tru skreet innovator—has created certain memes. His Andre the Giant/Obey campaign has influenced thousands of other artists, whose work can be seen in some ways as Fairey-esque (again, regardless of whether that makes such devotees progressives or idiots).

Moreover, visual artists (like writers) “quarry out” genres and forms and themes. (This idea I got from Robert Alter’s Rogue’s Progress.) We only have X number of years on earth; we only have Z number of interests. Trying to cover too much ground inspires some artists, keeps them on their toes. Others find a single zahir/idea/theme/grail so intriguing that they never need to (never can) look away. (In the literary world, look at Thomas Bernhard. Or listen to the falling-apart rhythm-language of Beckett, from Watt to Molloy to How It Is.)

Look at Maya Lin or Richard Serra: Their geographic art is stunning, timeless, and open; it makes us look at our own world in a new way; waves of earth and mountains of steel remind us of our own inelegant smallness and mortality. And yet both Lin and Serra move in perfectly predictable patterns.

If Serra started painting miniatures of ponies and kittens (the way poet John Ashbery started making collages of pin-up girls and cacti), then he’d lose some predictability. He would not necessarily gain “innovation.” Innovation—adding some new tool to the box of art, expanding what art is, showing previous ideas in a new light, changing how we show anything at all—is not the opposite of predictability, which, while staid-sounding, is nonetheless bound up with the very idea of association-over-time and thus of identity. We are ourselves only when we are predictable. The more we defy patterns, prevent identification, escape meanings, the more we label ourselves “crazy” (or prophetic).

Not that a certain measure of unpredictability is isn’t necessary, especially in art. Perhaps surprising-the-self is good for the self; it adds options, clarifies past choices. Recently I cut my hair. Now I surprise myself when I look in the mirror. If the artist is a mirror held up the world and the societies of the world, then perhaps we do want to be surprised now and again by our own collective appearance. Someone has to cut our hair. Back in his Andre days, perhaps that barber was Fairey. In his handbag days (today), I’m not sure.

Of course, to spin the question of associations-with-self around yet another axis altogether, it’s always possible that someone co-opts your own “predictable” style, perhaps years after your death, for their own purposes. Check out the familiar painting styles of Dalí and Ernst, now selling cars. Or do as Mr. Johnson recommends and compare Fairey’s provocative anti-war prints with Maoist posters.

Either way, what is predictable today will be innovative tomorrow (”retro”); and what once seemed gloriously strange (Dalí, Andre’s mug telling me to OBEY) will soon seen worthy of the MoMA store, at best, or the collective catalogue of overly familiar “hip” T-shirts, at worst.  (Right next to “Cougar Hunter,” “Canada: America’s Hat,” and of course Che.)

Formula rex, formula mortis. *

(* Or something like that. I learned all my Latin from the names of dinosaurs, who I hear tell were both highly unpredictable and impersonal, like a bunch of gargantuan mesothermic clones of Rush Limbaugh, on acid.)