Oh-Oh, the Artists Are After Us
Today's New York Times includes a lengthy article titled "Caution: Angry Artists at Work," by Roberta Smith. The theme of the article is that "The Republican Party's choice of New York for its 2004 national convention, which has made a lot of people very nervous, may have done the city a favor." How? The Republican convention has revitalized the city's art world, which is putting on anti-Bush and anti-Republican exhibits all over town:
Political fervor is being translated into art in mediums that range from painting and sculpture to Web art to political ephemera. At the moment, President Bush and the G. O. P. are the chief art-world targets: no one seems to have a critical word to say about the failings of the Democrats.
What a surprise.
The article, and the art, are about as dumb as you would expect. Here is a sample:
The centerpiece...is Rachel Mason's double portrait/self-portrait bust "Kissing President Bush," a decidedly ambiguous work that is in some ways touchingly vulnerable. On first sight, the piece can trigger a number of associations: Jeff Koons's marble sculptures, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, an incestuous Pietà, entrapment. It may also make you wonder whether any marital infidelities lurk in President Bush's shadow.
Well, it doesn't actually cause me to wonder about President Bush, but it does raise a question or two about the sculptor. Here it is:
Of course, as noted above, not all of New York's political art is negative. The picture below is described by Ms. Smith, in the multimedia commentary accompanying the article, as a "sympathetic" portrait of John Kerry, which shows him as "sensitive" and "aristocratic." It's funny, but this is a stylized version of the same shot that I described as "creepy" a little while ago. It comes from Kerry's 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Creepiness, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder:
I'm sorry to see that an old friend from South Dakota has jumped on the bandwagon:
The program comes into the present with Julie Talen's "Sixty Cameras Against the War," a kaleidoscopic documentary of the 2004 march in New York City against the Iraq war.
Julie's brother Bill (Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping) is a street theater impresario who will be conducting his own anti-Bush campaign during the convention. There was an article about him in, if memory serves, the Wall Street Journal, a few weeks ago. Bill was, many years ago, a friend of mine.
I won't be looking them up when I'm in New York next week.
