Clinton Fein (born 1964 in South Africa) is an artist, writer and activist, noted for his company Apollomedia and its controversial website Annoy.com, as well as its Supreme Court victory against Janet Reno, United States Attorney General, regarding the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act in 1997.
After living in New York for a couple of years, Fein moved to Los Angeles, where he began reporting directly to the President of Orion Pictures, as part of the creative team for numerous films, among them Academy Award-winning Dances with Wolves and The Silence of the Lambs.
[8] Fein, represented by Michael Traynor of Cooley Godward LLP and by William Bennett Turner of Rogers, Joseph, O'Donell and Phillips, filed a lawsuit against Janet Reno, former United States Attorney General, challenging the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act (CDA).
In United States v. ApolloMedia, Fein argued that this gag order violated the First Amendment and the statutory requirement that it have a definite duration.
As an artist, Fein is represented by Toomey Tourell in San Francisco and Axis Gallery in New York, and his shows have been dogged by controversy.
Clutching a crucifix with a nod to artist Andres Serrano and with another Giuliani targeted work, Chris Ofili's Virgin Mary forming the backdrop, copy on the top of the image reads: "Mike for Mayor" and at the bottom, "Start Spreading the News."
[20] The first of the images, reviewed at Chelsea's Axis Gallery by The New York Times' Ken Johnson,[21] was described as "an American flag with the stars and stripes made from the text of the official Abu Ghraib report ... accompanied by fifty representations of the iconic image of a hooded man teetering on a box with wires trailing from his arms comprising the stars."
It was this interview that Fein cited as a catalyst for his exhibition Torture, which opened at Toomey Tourell gallery in San Francisco in January 2007,[23] featuring gigantic, high-resolution photographs[24] that reenacted infamous scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq [1].
"[28] Fein is the current editor of First Amendment Project's web log and writes a blog, Pointing Fingers [2] for the San Francisco Chronicle.