Fairey points out that when Andre (now referred to almost exclusively as "the Giant" to avoid any legal contretemps with the WWF) orders viewers to "Obey," he is in fact telling them to "Disobey." It's a message teenagers and young adults enjoy to such a degree that Fairey can barely keep up with demand for his posters, and he's had to farm out T-shirts and additional Giant merchandise to selected companies.

But that rebellious message would mean little without Fairey's street cred. From the beginning, Fairey adopted the tactics of graffiti artists and earned his stripes by "getting up" all over the nation. His willingness to put his ass on the line and be arrested hasn't hurt either.

Fairey's been busted in Philadelphia, Long Beach, Calif., and New York, where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's anti-graff squads caught the artist with a ton of Giant stuff in '96. When Fairey, who's diabetic but in wiry good health otherwise, got sick in the slammer waiting for his court date, the authorities hurried his case through. He got off with time served.

Denizens of the street were impressed, and remain so. Stephen Powers, renegade author of "The Art of Getting Over," a book regarded as the graffiti bible, gives Fairey mad props. "I remember being on the fence about whether or not I liked his work," Powers e-mails from New York. "When a Bronx youth pointed to a face he did and said, 'Yo, I hear that nigga got one of those on the Great Wall of China!' That, and his extensive arrest record tell me he's really committed -- or should be committed."

"Who said, 'The tree of liberty must be watered with rebellion'?" Powers asks. "Shep makes questioning the BS we're handed on a daily basis standard procedure. That's necessary to our growth as humans."

Similarly, art commentator Carlo McCormick, a senior editor at Paper magazine in New York, is a fan of Giant art, demonstrating Fairey's ability to win over the intelligentsia.

"He's kind of advertising, but he's advertising 'nothing,'" says McCormick. "He puts it out in such a way that you need to fill in some sort of explanation. It's telling you to buy and obey, but you don't know what to buy or who to obey. It works on a very simple level of grabbing people and making them question what that sign is. Once you start to question what that sign is, maybe you start to question what they all are."

"He's really tapped into something. People, without even understanding phenomenology, get in on this elaborate joke of putting out this empty signifier."

Not everyone finds Fairey's work so engaging. Recently, he came to an agreement with authorities on his home turf of San Diego to cease his postering campaign there. Then there are adherents of the famous "broken windows" theory, which posits that crime is often the result of the breakdown in law and order as represented by such activities as vandalism, graffiti and the like. To them, Fairey is simply a lawbreaker who should be imprisoned and fined for his activities. For McCormick, the issue is not so cut and dried.

"Basically you have a lot of kids right now, at least I can speak for New York, who have seen the entire available visual surface of the city being turned into one big For Sale sign," McCormick says. "People are feeling, I don't know, violated. Our world is now cluttered with ads. There's no escaping them as you walk down the street. Maybe graffiti is at a wane right now in pop culture, but it's bigger than ever on the streets. There're more kids out there feeling obliged to take back that space for personal use."

Hence the appeal to teens and young adults who mimic Fairey's graffiti-art tactics by putting up posters and stickers on their own. Sure, they may not be able to quote Heidegger, but it doesn't take a degree in philosophy to understand that the whole Giant thing is fucking with the man.

Though Fairey gets up a lot on his own initiative, the help of the auxiliary members of the posse allows him to boast the distribution of over 1 million stickers worldwide along with more than 8,000 posters and thousands of spray-paint stencils.

(Fairey is quick to point out that he does not endorse vandalizing private homes or businesses, preferring abandoned property, construction site "snipe" walls or, his favorite, city-owned utility boxes. However, he has "liberated" billboards in the past on the grounds that everyone has a right to the visual space they occupy.)

Frequent road trips cross-country and abroad attest to the Giant campaign's subversive appeal. Last November, he was a smash in London when the hip Chamber of Pop Culture there sponsored a Giant blitzkrieg. Fairey similarly was hailed as a conquering hero in Japan in May when he bombed Tokyo to promote shows at the funky P House and Alleged galleries, who feted Fairey & Co. like they were the frickin' Beatles.

Where's the saturation point -- the plateau at which the colossal joke is over and the Giant campaign is no longer subversive? Fairey doesn't have an answer to that. For the time being, while his design firm caters to large corporate clients such as Mountain Dew and NBC, Giant remains his pet art project octopus with a ravenous appetite, one to which Fairey dedicates all of his excess time and resources. Will there ever be a time when he's no longer postering or bombing?

"Only if I'm wanted on a national level," he laughs, an eyebrow raised as if to say that all things are possible. "Until then, this is what I do for fun."

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