Shepard Fairey is the guy that made that now-ubiquitous Obama poster. The guy has certainly got his 15 minutes of fame leading up to the inauguration and, well, throughout the week. Fairey has been critiqued as a hack and an opportunist. And a guy who likes his 15 minutes of fame. The guy has done Charlie Rose's show. Glad I missed that one. But I dig his art.

Now the bad stuff, the really bad stuff. The AP is going after him for using its photo of Obama in his poster:

"The image, Fairey has acknowledged, is based on an Associated Press photograph, taken in April 2006 by Manny Garcia on assignment for the AP at the National Press Club in Washington.

The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation. Fairey disagrees.

'The Associated Press has determined that the photograph used in the poster is an AP photo and that its use required permission,' the AP's director of media relations, Paul Colford, said in a statement."

And there's been a new critique making the rounds. The critique is that he's a plagiarist. Artist Mark Vallen lobbed the missive a while ago. But it's starting to pop up now.

Read More "Is Shepard Fairey A Plagiarist?" »

Before Shepard Fairey wheatpasted Obama's portrait to walls, windows and the backs of those pushy midwesterners blocking your view of the jumbotron Tuesday afternoon, Alberto Korda's 1960 portrait of Ernesto "Che" Guevara was the most ubiquitous piece of hagiography to infiltrate the closets of American youth. Unlike Fairey's Obama, however, the very mass re-production and clueless consumption of Che's visage shows that 41 years postmortem, the man's ideas are as forgotten as they are exalted.

Add to this two dimensional T-shirt portrait yet another flat depiction of the face of the Cuban revolution—Steven Soderbergh's epic, two-part, 4-hour-and-23-minute biopic Che.

Read More "Who is “Che”? Soderbergh Hasn’t Got a Clue" »