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.
Fein now presides the board of First Amendment Project,[4] a nonprofit organization that protects and promotes freedom of information, expression, and petition.
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 2001, Fein was scheduled to open a solo exhibition, Annoy.com, (based on his critically acclaimed[17] web site of the same name), in San Francisco in October.
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.