Submitted to a Candid World

This is not good art. According to its press release, the piece to the right, from an exhibit titled “The Assassination of Barack Obama,” tries to make the point that the public is too willing to engage in the assassination of Obama’s character. But the message doesn’t come across that way; in fact, it doesn’t come across at all. It’s bad art.  Since art, and personal morality-based objections to art, have become the norm in the culture wars (thank you Focus on the Family), I feel obligated to explain my objection in depth.

I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt to almost any artist.  After all, art lately has become more of an exercise in questioning art than anything resembling art of old, and I’m fine with that.  I think it’s very interesting.  For example, I’m a fan of Jeff Koons (see left), even though calling myself a “fan” of his might prove that I don’t understand him… anyways, I digress.

The problem with the “Assassination” installation is that it’s not in any way self-evident.  Neither its theme nor its attempted message are new to the art world – it’s an appropriation piece, which attempts to use the language of hate to criticize it, in the style of Andres Serrano’s portraits of Klansmen, and Wojnarowicz’s photography of homophobic graffiti – but its execution is remarkably poor.  Where Serrano and Wojnarowicz succeed, this artist fails.  By way of example, one of Wojnarowicz’s famous pieces is a photograph of New York city graffiti, “fight AIDs, kill a quere,” which he displays as a way of mocking the ignorance of homophobes, who can’t even spell to articulate their hatred.  Wojnarowicz’s criticism of the subject that he photographs is evident at even a cursory reading.

But in the “Assassination” installation, the artist doesn’t really do much to make his criticism clear.  The message of hate actually sounds serious and credible, at least compared with things like this (example to the right).  Absent any clarification, they’re indistinguishable.  If he’s trying to use the language of hate to criticize hate, the message, without clarification, could just as easily be mistaken for hate itself.  The “Assassination” artist works in a long tradition of artists who try to declaw hate by showing it for how overblown and ignorant it really is, but the problem is that the “Assassination” installation isn’t that much off-target from what’s really being said about Obama, making the piece indistinguishable from the hate it criticizes.

There ought to be a cardinal rule for artists: if you need wall text to avoid conveying the exact opposite of the message you want to convey, you’re doing it wrong.

And the comparison to Duchamp in the press release is just wrong.  Seriously, get a new publicist.