‘jOker’: ‘Art is What You Can Get Away With’

by Andrew Leigh

In 1987, Andres Serrano submerged a small plastic crucifix in a glass jar of his own urine and called it Piss Christ. Not to be outdone, Chris Ofili daubed elephant dung on a painting of the Virgin Mary.

While some narrow-minded philistines complained, the artistic establishment heaped praise (and money) on these and works like them. The National Endowment for the Arts was so impressed with Serrano’s work they granted him $15,000 courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. For his effort, Ofili was awarded the Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious art award.

Other recent Turner Prize honorees include Damien Hirst, whose works feature livestock suspended in formaldehyde, and Tracy Elmin, whose nominated work was an unmade bed. The Turner Prize is named in honor of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), renowned as the original “painter of light” (pace Thomas Kinkade). (One of the Stuckists, a group of anti-conceptual figurative painters who demonstrate annually against the Prize, puckishly said, “The only artist who wouldn’t be in danger of winning the Turner Prize is Turner.”)

Art and Popular Culture defines “transgressive art” as: “art forms that aim to transgress; i.e., to outrage or violate basic mores and sensibilities.”

The French, naturally, have a phrase for it: “Epater la bourgeoisie,” or to shock mainstream sensibilities. Or as Andy Warhol put it, “Art is what you can get away with.”

Hirst, the formaldehyde artist, said early in his career, “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say ‘f off.’ But after a while you can get away with things.”

And oh boy, did he. Hirst holds the record for the most expensive work of art by a living artist. His Lullaby Spring, a medicine cabinet filled with pills (and not even real ones with pharmacological effects), sold at auction for $19.2 million to the Emir of Qatar. And in two auction days in 2008, Hirst sold $198 million worth of, well, stuff.

The key phrase, however, is “what you can get away with.” And this is determined by the artistic establishment. Shocking the middle classes is one thing. Shocking the art establishment is quite another. And when those sensibilities largely overlap, as they do in these early, halcyon days of the Obama administration, then woe betide anyone who dares to draw outside the lines set by the media-education-government complex.

A year after 9/11, Hirst said, “The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually… You’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing.”

Indeed, the post-9/11 era produced a veritable flowering of transgressive political art, most of it directed at one particular individual hated by the artistic establishment: George W. Bush. When it came to Bush, to go from Warhol to Cole Porter, “anything goes.” No depiction was too grotesque.

Since most artists are highly constrained by political correctness of the leftist sort, when it came to depicting Bush, the constraints fell away, and an almost ecstatic cruelty was unleashed. Years from now, the art it produced will be an embarrassment to its creators (if it is remembered at all — never underestimate people’s ability to forget their mistakes).

Much has been made of the recent poster popping up around Los Angeles depicting President Obama as the Joker.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, said: “Depicting the president as demonic and a socialist goes beyond political spoofery, it is mean-spirited and dangerous.”

My own quibble with the poster isn’t the subject-matter, but that the depiction is a bit stale (the Joker is so 2008) and the caption is too on-the-nose. I would have liked a little more wit or wordplay in the caption. (Perhaps we should have a caption contest?)

Nevertheless, anybody who’s subscribed to Vanity Fair or watched The Daily Show has no standing to express outrage at the Obama Joker poster (or to object to any fatuousness). And whatever you think of the poster, its creator has more cojones than all of the anti-Bush comedians, artists and columnists put together. Because artists and other cultural figures today are more like the sheep preserved in that Hirst glass case pictured above than they care to admit.

So what follows is a refresher course on the level of respect artists held for the office of president during Bush’s tenure, a rogue’s gallery of bad taste:

Here’s the illustration (done by Drew Friedman) that Vanity Fair posted on their website, almost exactly one year before the Obama version appeared:

And here are some comments on the Vanity Fair site:

“Great stuff from the talented Friedman (as always).”

“Very good!!!”

“Brilliant and profound.”

(Unbelievable as it seems, I don’t think they were being sarcastic.)

Then there’s the ultimate online insult, so heinous it has its own law (Godwin’s). Search “Bush as Hitler” on Google images and you get more than 1.6 million results. One of many:

And remember the ever-popular “Bush as chimp” caricatures? (These were the very height of Shavian wit.) So many to choose from, here’s just one:

Speaking of “on-the-nose,” a Google image search of “Bush as devil” turns up more than 3 million hits. Here’s one:

And if a single evil metaphor isn’t enough for you, there are numerous mix-and-match combinations, such as this mash-up of Bush as Hitler and Satan:

And let’s not forget this tastefully done portrait. It first appeared as a cover for the Village Voice and then popped up on countless T-shirts, posters, and even an episode of HBO’s “True Blood”:

If you prefer a healthy dollop of racism in your mockery, you don’t have to look further than this cartoon, which oh-so-cleverly tweaks Bush’s Secretary of State:

The LA Weekly didn’t much care for the Obama poster (despite their past championing and displaying of similarly tacky anti-Bush propaganda). Their blogger commented (weirdly), “The only thing missing is a noose.” Of course, when the noose was on Sarah Palin’s (boo! hiss!) neck, they thought that was just (and I quote) “Super!”

One of the cardinal sins a leftist can commit is to “Other,” which is “the demonization and dehumanization of groups.” Postmodernists like to make much of this, blaming the West for “othering” minorities, foreigners, and Asians, among other people. (Of course, they never mention that the reverse is usually even more virulent.)

As the pictures above demonstrate, in the past eight years, what the left has done to Bush, and to Republicans in general, is to “other” them: to demonize them, to treat them like some alien entity that is less than human, undeserving of common decency.

And what the left experience, when they see the Joker posters pop up, is what psychologists call “projection” — the tearing-down process they subjected Bush to, they fear will happen to their hero. They fear that Obama’s opponents will succeed in reducing their icon to a laughingstock like Bush was (and is — for now).

To paraphrase Obama’s erstwhile spiritual advisor: The cultural establishment’s chickens have come home to roost.


Email this to a friend | Print | Share on Facebook | | Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted Aug 6th 2009 at 5:03 am in Art, Culture, Featured Story, Politics | 98 Comments