I Don’t Know About Art, But I Know Obama When I See Him

By Mark Kaufman

Interesting article by Jen Graves in The Stranger today on the boom in Barack Obama based art. I for one am not quite sure what to make of this phenomenon, except to say that it is a rare example of people getting creative in a positive way rather than a negative way. Usually whether someone is a professional artist, designer or rank amateur, they would only get motivated about what they DON’T like about a candidate to make art, pointing out shortcomings, or supposed evils of the candidate. So that’s a good thing, I also think that modern forms of art making and communication techniques are probably driving this popular Obama as art subject. For all I know plenty of people were painting worshipful portraits of Walter Mondale, but had no way of distributing it to the masses. Thanks to YouTube, ebay and social networking technology it’s easy to let the world know who you love. That’s a good thing too. Conversely, these same distribution methods make it easy for those that want to tear someone down (myself included) to show the world why candidate A is evil, not to be trusted and a failure as a human being.