In the wake of the why-isn’t-this-a-scandal over the co-option of the National Endowment for the Arts (and, no, there probably shouldn’t be an NEA) by Obama’s flacks, this fascinating Commentary piece by Michael J. Lewis is timely. The whole article is well worth reading (and I won’t attempt to summarize it here), but this section certainly struck a chord:
Campaign posters are discarded like yesterday’s newspaper the morning after an election, but not in the case of Obama. If anything, the demand for posters bearing his image has only grown. A recent New York Times front-page story highlighted the trend of amateur artists’ trying their hand at painting the new president. In one three-month period, 787 Obama paintings were auctioned on eBay, showing the new president in every possible pose, and a few impossible ones: standing commandingly before the White House, cradling a basketball and wearing a Washington Wizards uniform, gamely wrestling a bear on Wall Street, even flying naked on the back of a unicorn.
What is striking about these paintings is not their quality, about which the less said the better, but their consistent tone. They belong to that class of objects known as “devotional art.” Such objects are not only intended as votive offerings, to serve as the focus of veneration; the actual process of making them is itself an act of piety…
I cling to the (not entirely forlorn) hope that a few of these artists were just trying to make a buck, but even so . . .