When Presidents Paint

Images from Gawker.com

With the discovery that George W. Bush has been secretly at work on paintings, the art world experienced something on the order of a tear in the space-time continuum. 

Citizens of that utopia called 'the art world' have had to deal with the severe cognitive dissonance that results from liking the work and loathing the source.

Bush, after all, is remembered as the man who cut taxes and relaxed regulations on the wealthiest American citizens and industries. After 9/11, Bush squandered the good will of the world and led America into two wars whose primary purpose appears to have been to provide unending work for defense contractors. His administration perfected Orwellian newspeak with educational reform programs that had such benevolent names as 'No Child Left Behind' that rewarded 'achievement' while fundamentally skewing the goals of education. In the last election, we watched as chagrined candidates from his his party pretended his administration hadn't existed.

But W's paintings have been popping up on Facebook and all over the Internet (1,590,000 Google hits for "George W. Bush paintings" and counting). People seem to like them for their naivete. People are reminded of art they love, from history or from the present. One of the funniest lines of reasoning (one Jerry Saltz touches on) is the symbolism of the bathtub in Bush's pictures and its connection to other artists. Art, after all, is about art, right? So it only makes sense that if George W. Bush is making paintings, they should be connected to other paintings.This is the sort of pop culture soul-searching Slate was made for.

Some people have been quick to point out that Hitler was a painter, too. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter was a poet. Being Hitler didn't make Hitler's paintings 'good' or 'bad' any more than being Jimmy Carter redeemed the ex-president's verse. The confusion of the person for the product - the most profound muddle faced by artists in the 21st century - is at the core of this problem. People who hate Bush struggle to figure out how they can like his paintings...or even rationalize their existence.

But it's startlingly easy to resolve this conflict - one needs only to remember that not all paintings are art. Before crowd-curating, Marcel Duchamp described how things made by people are ratified by discussion in a 1957 statement, The Creative Act (you can listen to Duchamp here...). W's paintings need to be seen for what they are - the products of a hobby enjoyed by retired individual who emailed them to his sister. He didn't put them on display in a gallery or museum. They weren't discovered - they were hacked into. The assumption that they are art appears to rest on the medium in which they have been made - paint. As an industry, the art world is pretty good at separating things made with paint into categories of 'works of art' and 'museum-quality oil paintings' that wish they were art. Here is yet another opportunity to practice such discernment.

What' really tragic about this is all the wasted time. I am as guilty as everyone else of giving Bush's pictures more attention than they deserve by adding to the melee. While thousands of artists produce work that we could be talking about - attempting to contribute to a millennia-long conversation about cultural value by producing objects and images and setting them into a context of other objects and images - we are spending time rooting through the private emails of someone who much of the world regards as a war criminal.

Let's make sure the former president is remembered for the right things.