Once a year the portrait of Chairman Mao that hangs above Tiananmen Gate is replaced by a new one. Who the artist is has never been disclosed. For Napoleon, Jacque-Louis David was his favorite painter and the man most responsible for creating his iconic image. Artists like these do not toil away at their craft because they love their leader, they are told to paint. That’s what makes Obama art so dangerous, the artists do it for love. In the last election the public plastered the image of Obama to America with the same hormonal glee that I did when I nailed Farah Fawcett to my childhood wall.
Barack Obama told voters everything they needed to know about who he was, but mesmerized by his image, America didn’t listen, and now finds itself in a dirty shirt underlined by a faded message.
The artistic images of Obama are no accident and they can come from only one place. A place so deprived of rational thinking that when the brain has a vision, it sees itself changing the world with every turn of its cog. I’m speaking of the American contemporary art scene.
Salvador Dali once famously said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Artist on the left produce nothing, disguised as something, hoping the masses will imitate it. When Sheppard Fairey stole the image of Obama from an AP photo and created the “Hope” poster – he knew what he was doing. That’s what makes Fairey so brilliant, he knows how to sell an image without being told. My respect for Fairey comes from his willingness to tell you up front that his art is propaganda.
Not so much with other artists.
David Cordero went a step farther than Fairey’s hero worship by creating a life size Obama as a messianic figure – entitled “Blessing,” which gave him a moment in the national spotlight but no lasting following and no buyers for mass produced neon lit Jesus Obama’s. Liberal artist are only able to see outrage in the world when they’re political hero or God is not in office.
The sophomoric art of the Bush presidency was only hailed as artistic because artist were creating it for an audience that was, at the time, susceptible to anything they created. And, if it could ultimately hold their morning coffee or cover their waxed chest, all the better for them to show the world their outrage while making money off hyped up Hope and Change fools.
These same artists are not creating work today that depicts Americans struggling through this tough time in history because that won’t get them into nightclubs in New York and L.A. Instead they spend their time designing Nike sneakers and filling out paperwork for grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and hoping the money comes through by 2012 so they can paint the evils of being a Mormon, a Christian or a conservative.
With Democrats is such deep water headed into the November elections, will artist like Fairey attempt to bail out their party with pop culture art in the hopes of washing away the rational thinking of the American public? Only after November will we know if we sat and watched the paint dry, or we covered it up with a broad stroke of primer. If art is to be part of the culture war, then we as conservatives should break out the war paint and color the face of America back to its red, white and blue.