Rebellious university students once used to sport images of chairman Mao, comrade Lenin or Che Guevara on their T-shirts as a sartorial demonstration of their counterculture cred. But who, in this, more bland and homogenous age, could similarly embody such revolutionary dissent?
Going by the monuments springing up in New York, the portraits being churned out in Dafen, China, the murals on English walls, the Lego-bricks depiction by dissident artist Ai Weiwei, today’s anti-establishment hero is very different from the brooding romanticism of, say, Che. It is the bespectacled and nerdy figure of the American whistle-blower Edward Snowden. But, what do all those sculptures, paintings and depictions of Mr Snowden really say? Come to that, what did that iconic image of Che – the one based on a photograph by Alberto Korda, which adorned dorms all over the world – really say? Did it actually stand for anything or just look good on the wall?
