Art for Obama: "terrifying"

Note that I resisted the urge to festoon the word art with quotation marks. No need to paint all the pieces with, er, the same brush. Judge for yourself.

Two items. The first, from Charlotte Allen, concerns artist (again, no quotes) Shepard Fairey, the man who brought us that ubiquitous Obama HOPE poster with the distinct Marxist vibe, and who recently (finally) admitted he lied about the AP photo he used as its basis. Excerpt:

Fairey, by his own description, is a man of the left. His work, as his gallery put it in a 2007 news release, critiques the "underpinnings of the capitalist machine." Fairey first became the darling of political liberals with a poster in which he depicted then-President George W. Bush as a vampire, complete with fangs and blood dripping down his chin. After the Obama campaign officially incorporated Fairey's "Hope" poster series into its electoral efforts, Obama sent the artist a letter, included in an exhibit of his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, saying, "I am privileged to be a part of your art work and proud to have your support."

Privileged? Proud?

Please read the rest.

The second is Philip Kennicott's review of Art for Obama, "a survey of images and sculpture produced in support of Obama's 2008 campaign for president." Excerpts from this must-read:

The gloom sets in slowly, page after colorful page, slogan after inspiring slogan. It is a catalogue of celebratory art, of smiles and hope and change, and somehow, it leaves you with a hollow, panicky feeling in the gut.

[. . .]

The artists included here feel more like insiders whose invitation got lost in the mail.

[. . .]

It's hard to credit this art with too much sophistication. Rather than call it political art, which has a long and noble tradition, it might be better to label it merely partisan art.

[. . .]

And much of it is simply, even embarrassingly saccharine, such as Amy Martin's image of a mother holding her baby up to watch butterflies buzzing about the word "Hope," or Ben Dutro's "Embrace for the White House," which shows a cartoon donkey hugging a cartoon elephant, above the words "Unite America." Some of the work is so treacly and weirdly sexual at the same time that it almost feels borrowed from serious artists such as Lisa Yuskavage, who mixes storybook figures with strangely sick and naughty eroticism. And so we get Lukas Ketner's "Barack on the Water," a digital painting that shows the president, shirt open and surrounded by red roses, emerging from a pool of milky water while a white stallion cavorts on the seminal waves. One hopes this is a sophisticated comment on sexuality, race and the erotic desire for strong male leaders. One suspects it isn't.

[. . .]

Most of the work feels borrowed, and borrowed without irony. White doves of peace fly through these images in flocks to rival Hitchcock's birds. The president's face appears with the frequency of Bashir al-Assad's on the streets of Damascus. The repetition of the president's face and form -- often in images cravenly indebted to Fairey's -- grows oppressive and even frightening.

Two images hint at this claustrophobia, but again, with an ambivalence that is more confusing than comforting. Sueraya Shaheen's "Right on Track, London Tube" is an arrangement of cellphone camera images of the president, such that he seems to haunt the London Underground, peering in its train windows and the station walls. He's everywhere, it says, but not clearly enough to be an indictment of the cult of personality it echoes. And Ocean Clark's "Obama Entrances the Crowd," an acrylic painting, shows an image of Obama speaking to a swirl of red and yellow and orange circles, seemingly capturing a crowd whipped up to conflagration by the power of his rhetoric.

Members of the "entranced" crowd are faceless blanks, and Obama's head looks like some sort of memento mori. See the slide show accompanying the article for this and a few other works cited.

These are terrifying images, made by artists seemingly unaware of the fragile line that separates democratic enthusiasm from totalitarian mania. It's too easy, however, to say that this naive collection of Obamamania amounts to any serious desire for fascism or authoritarian control, as the president's critics will surely do. But it does show the emptiness of imagination in a group of artists who suddenly find themselves on the crest of a historical wave, unable to invent anything new, unable to articulate any sense of the moment beyond the observation that it is "all very inspiring and a lot of fun."

Those are the words of Ron English, who was told by the organizers of the original exhibit that he should "please stay positive." It seems a small dictate, to stay positive, just as it must have seemed a small nudge from Sergant when he encouraged artists on a conference call to "pick something, whether it's health care, education, the environment," and "apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative community's utilities and bring them to the table." Leave aside the question of whether that was a re-politicization of the NEA. Leave aside the inestimable damage it did to an agency that had been scrupulously depoliticized over the past eight years.

What should have been clear, and what becomes painfully clear from "Art for Obama," is that this is a very bad recipe for making good art.

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