The socialist-art impulse Obama has released
Paul K. writes:
Regarding the painting of the bare-chested Obama messiah emerging from the ocean that you posted yesterday, when it comes to the Obamas, liberalism knows no kitsch. At least in Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, and Kim Jong Il’s North Korea, the state pays the artists to produce hagiographic portraits. In the Land of the Free, the artists provide them out of their own sincere adoration.
Here is a painting by Elizabeth Peyton entitled “Michelle and Sasha Obama Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention August 2008,” which was displayed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and featured on the cover of their bimonthly magazine. Michelle plays the Madonna while gazing grimly yet worshipfully at her husband as he speaks. Can you imagine a painting like this being displayed in a prestigious museum of contemporary art, without irony, were it not of the Obamas?
LA writes:
Also notice in this socialist-revolutionary-heroic painting how the two white faces behind the glowering, “black La Pasionaria” Michelle have no features. (Readers may need to use arrow keys to scroll the entire painting.)
Paul K. continues:
The Washington Post has a smaller photo of the painting and an interview with the artist, Elizabeth Peyton, who says:
“This particular image comes from Jet magazine. I was struck by this image of Michelle and Sasha because it was so normal and monumental at the same time—a transcendent mother-and-child picture in the midst of history being made. The original photo was already great but by making it into a painting transformed it into a transcendent image. One might say it’s a milestone to have Barack Obama elected as president, but to have an African American first lady and daughters somehow seems more transgressive and culture changing.”
So clearly we have something here that’s monumental and transcendent about a transgressive and culture changing event.
BTW, as a student of contemporary art, I might mention that, to the contemporary art critic, what elevates such a painting above mere illustration or Norman-Rockwellesque sentimentality is its poor technical execution. Does that sound strange? I don’t know how else to put it. Craftsmanship is highly suspect in today’s art world.
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LL writes:
Of course craftsmanship is “highly suspect.” It’s one of those frigid, rigid Caucasian constructs that shackles the creative spirit.
A minor omission in Paul K.’s catalog of socialist utopias and the “art” they sponsor: Latin America, where any would-be revolutionary with a palette, an agenda, and several square feet of schoolyard wall can make his mark. Of course, under Busheron we busily imported this type of dreck as well, as demonstrated by what Steve Sailer puckishly terms “Bush’s Zero-Down-Payment Mural.”
(See also the bizarre murals at Denver International Airport, which in some instances are so disturbing it has been speculated they are designed to serve as triggers for those subjected to MK-Ultra-style mind control.)
LA replies:
Virtually everything I’ve seen by a Latin American “artist” in this country has been bent out of shape with resentment, sick, disturbing, left-wing. Where’s all that wonderful Latino life-affirming “vibrancy” we keep being told about?
Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 20, 2009 01:43 PM | Send