I don’t know why it should necessarily be that conservatives have lousy taste in art, but it does seem to be so. On one level it’s understandable that conservatives should like ‘representational’ art, e.g. painting of actual things, or music that is lyrical, and reject anything else, such as any kind of abstract painting or sculpture. There’s that cognitive limitation thing again.
And we could discuss Trump, who likes nothing so much as gilt on everything. And lowbrow music for his Kennedy Center and rallies. Perhaps he has paintings of tigers on black velvet somewhere; surely his MAGA fans do. But let’s look at this.
Slate, Christina Cauterucci, today: I Went to the Trump Admin’s “Patriotic” Art Exhibit. Dear God., subtitled “It was like a HomeGoods display around the Fourth of July.”
Have you ever wanted to see John Adams’ facial pores? Examine the precise hairline of Alexander Hamilton’s unibrow? Admire the sheen of James Madison’s pillowy lips?
Then you’ll love a series of portraits by Brandon Ralph currently on view in Washington. As part of an exhibition titled Passport to Patriotism: 250 Years of Diplomacy, mounted by the State Department at the Art Museum of the Americas, the blown-up images render the familiar faces of the Founding Fathers in granular detail. Ralph, who created the works by running famous paintings through an A.I. model that mimicked Ralph’s own photographic style, calls them the “first-ever photographic portraits” of America’s dads.
And
A declaration of uncomplicated national pride, the exhibition comes as a rebuttal of sorts to Smithsonian displays that the Trump administration has deemed insufficiently flattering to the American ego. In this context, Ralph’s portraits read not as an invitation to ponder the founders’ imperfections but as a symbol of Donald Trump’s war on the arts. The president has installed handpicked Kennedy Center leaders who may shutter the venue for years; multiple Smithsonian museums have revised their offerings to appease him. Like these arts institutions under Trump’s thumb, Ralph’s portraits are hasty rejiggerings of artistic treasures, modified to allow him to place his own cheap imprint on something someone else made.
Sounds familiar. And:
It will not shock you to learn that this MAGA art exhibition is the product of a cascade of underqualified nepotism hires. One of the organizers, Art in Embassies Director Erin Scavino, is a former Apprentice contestant and the wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff. The other is her friend, who owned a pet-food store before being tapped by Scavino for a top national arts post. According to reporting from the New York Times, the two women have personal connections to several artists in the show.
Enough.
AlterNet covers it thusly: ‘Dear God’: Trump’s ‘patriotic’ AI slop art exhibit goes down in flames
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More destruction. If they stop collecting the data, they can pretend such people and things don’t exist.
JMG, today, from Wired: Commerce Dept Proposes To Have US Census Stop Counting Migrants, End Data On Minorities, LGBTQs
And
JMG, today, from NYT: WH Defunds Annual NOAA Report On Arctic Changes
La la la, I can’t hear you!
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I suspect they truly don’t believe they are lying, because they have no conception of how to tell what is true and what is not. If they “feel” something might be true, if something worries their “gut instinct,” that’s enough for them.
The Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn, yesterday: Vaccine Lies, Direct from the Oval Office, subtitled: “Nothing bad can happen,” Trump says—as measles levels keep rising.
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Leaving this thoughtful piece for last.
Robert Reich, today: The Rise of the Measles-Industrial Complex, subtitled “Why MAGA wants children to get sick and die”
Why would they do that? Well maybe not deliberately, but as a consequence of their policies, and they don’t see the connection.
On Monday Donald Trump issued an executive order that, if implemented, would substantially reduce the number of vaccines American children receive and, in practice, how many of them are vaccinated at all. While it’s not clear whether Trump’s order has any legal force, it will reinforce public skepticism of and hostility to vaccines, which has led to declining vaccination rates. This decline has in turn led to a surge in infectious diseases that had previously been virtually eradicated, notably measles. As the chart below shows, …
The piece goes on with a number of charts.
Interesting aside:
However, you know what does have a strong, well-documented correlation with autism? Air pollution. Childhood exposure to air pollution is clearly associated with higher rates of autism. Moreover, scientists have found a found a strong association between autism and pre-natal maternal exposure to particulate matter from fossil fuel pollution.
So Trump’s campaign against vaccines won’t reduce autism, but it will cause many children to suffer devastating, possibly deadly, infections diseases. Meanwhile, autism rates will rise as a result of his crusade against clean energy and in favor of dirty energy.
It’s about the general right-wing turn against vaccines, and science in general.
Why is this happening? Anti-vaccine sentiment is a lot like climate change denial. In both cases, to understand the politics one must do two things. First, follow the money: look at which interest groups benefit financially from misinformation, and why those groups have power. Second, follow the culture war: ask why this particular misinformation resonates with the prejudices and grievances of a segment of the population.
The money: all those peddling quack medicine. Thus the answer to both:
The modern right is a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-expertise movement that is highly receptive to conspiracy theories. And like RFK Jr during his recent interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, when confronted with scientific facts it flies into a sputtering rage. So the snake oil industry targets its marketing to the kind of person who listens to the rants of right-wing influencers, gets their news from Newsmax, and finds common cause with the neo-Nazi posters on X. By framing their false claims as “The Medical Miracles that the Elites Don’t Want You to Know About”, the snake oil hucksters create a receptive audience for conspiracy theories that malign actual medical miracles like vaccines.
And so on.
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OK, one more.
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today: Christian televangelist Katie Souza claims aliens stole her eggs and made a hybrid baby, subtitled: The televangelist claims an “inter-dimensional device” stole her eggs for decades. Don’t bother looking for evidence.
Some people (I won’t spell out which kind of people) will believe anything.
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Pettersson 6
