The Meaning of Art

One of the minor stories making the rounds of the blogs this week is about an anonymous artist who is posting a depiction of President Obama as the Joker from The Dark Knight.

Reactions range from chuckles on the right to hysteria on the left.

Personally, I found a revelatory moment in this. My entire life has been lived in the era of “modern art”, promulgated for the most part by talentless hacks who hide behind any of a number of rubrics, e.g. “art is about challenging our preconceptions”, “art is about getting us to see things differently”, “art is about knocking out the scaffolding under the structure of power”, “art is about getting government money from the National Endowment for the Arts” &c.

Here at last is a true specimen of what those modart poseurs were claiming to try to achieve (well, except for the NEA part). The poster attacks and undercuts the most powerful man in the world with visceral imagery — tied cleverly to pop culture — and a single loaded word, “socialism”, that carries an enormous amount of cultural baggage. The subversive message cannot be countered or argued away, because the message is visceral and not intellectualized. It is aesthetic precisely because it is a tonic to counter our anesthetic age.

It’s not hard to find commenters who are baffled by the association of the statist Obama with the anarchist Joker, but to me the message is clear: Obama is a person bent on destroying the ‘old’ order of this country (in which freedom is a higher value than equality), and he is using the even older tropes of the left to do it. Obamaphiles can’t see this happening, of course, so they are bewildered by the spreading anger that this President inspires. They lash out with charges of racism, and try to diminish the poster as “dangerous and mean“. They really don’t “get it”. Their outrage is undercut, as usual, by their record of passivity in response to similar images of the previous occupant of the White House.

The anonymity of the artist lends an air of credibility — literally “street cred” in this case — to this satire. An anonymous street artist speaks volumes with a single image, while the Bush-bashing images of incorporated media like Vanity Fair (Bush as Joker) and LA Weekly (Bush as Vampire) and the New York Times (Bush as Frankenstein/Hitler) are merely tired and asinine.

And to those who might find anonymous posters unfair and disturbing, I suggest that the government-organized cult of personality around President Obama is far more creepy.  A thousand U.S. elementary students make the world’s largest beaded mosaic to celebrate the leader’s birthday!? Yes, we can! Remind you of anybody?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 5 August 2009 at 16:26 and is filed under Politics & Society, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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