Artist Botero Portrays Abu Ghraib
Prominent Columbian artist Fernando Botero recently unveiled a series of paintings depicting the abuse of terrorist detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. "I, like everyone else, was shocked by the barbarity, especially because the United States is supposed to be this model of compassion," said Botero while explaining why he chose to paint the prison scenes. Botero is known for usually painting still lifes and peaceful scenes featuring highly stylized heavy-set people.
The Abu Ghraib paintings, which grossly exaggerate the treatment of terrorist detainees by U.S. military personnel, are being hailed as masterpieces and compared to Picasso's Guernica by leftist moonbats world-wide.
“`Abu Ghraib,' the numbered 1-50 paintings, will always be about Bush, and not the proverbial `few bad apples' serving as scapegoats," crows Ben Tanasborn in the anti-U.S. Middle East Online.
"We're fortunate to have men like Botero to shine a light on the real machinery of Bush's terror-apparatus. Already, 100,000 Iraqis have died in a gratuitous act of aggression, entire cities have been flattened and 17,000 Iraqis languish in overcrowded gulags waiting for an improbable turn-of-events," writes Mike Whitney in die-hard Stalinist Alexander Cockburn's neocom publication, CounterPunch, reminding the right-minded that they're fortunate to have men like David Horowitz to shine a light on the real machinery of the radical-left's anti-U.S. agenda.
Weighing in on Botero's Abu Ghraib series, leftist "Art for Change" blogger Mark Vallen says, "What Botero has achieved is nothing short of a contemporary equivalent to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, the masterwork painted in outrage over the aerial bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War," in a shining example of typical leftist false equivalence.
Opining that Surrealism is equal to neurosurgery makes about as much sense as comparing Picasso's Guernica, a painting that captures and concisely emotes the horror of the deliberate slaughter of approximately 1,650 Spanish civilians by Franco and the Nazi Luftwaffe, to Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings, which are misleading and highly sensationalized depictions of the nature of the humiliation that a small group of terrorist prisoners experienced at the hands of a miscreant few.
In the future, Mr. Botero and other famous artists might consider the challenge of tackling the subjects of the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Hussein's mass graves, the brutal torture and murder of prisoners by Che Guevara, Castro's prisons, the North Korean Gulag, the Soviet gulag, the results of a Palestinian suicide bombing, radical Islamists' treatment of women, the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the treatment of Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, Ken Bigley and other unfortunates at the hands of Islamic "freedom fighters," the Cambodian genocide and the murder of 3,000 innocents on September 11, 2001, to name a few, since it is indeed a formidable challenge to create art that exaggerates the horror of that which is in reality already maximally horrific.
We're waiting...
16 Comments:
I don't know, like all crappy art, what the art depicts is in the eye of the beholder.
This painting to me, looks like two plumbers I had working on my digs sewer line!
P.S. Since when did these exposing butt-crackers justify a brain surgeons wages!
LOL!
I quite agree. It's derivative Baroque art filtered through the lens of Colombian magic realism, latching on to current events to give the painter his 15 minutes of fame. Boring and bad!
Martin Heidegger posed the following question: is the artist the essential origin of the work of art, or vice versa. He concluded that the sought originary relationship is circular.
In other words, the pressing need felt by an artist to produce an image defines him or her, and defines the work.
Nowadays when moonbat and artist go together like sh!t and st!nk, I wonder if the time has come to update Heidegger with regard to this compulsion to produce moonbat art.
These are not passionate people. They are artistic/political Tourette's syndrome sufferers. Pointless Utopian dreams and nightmares go to these paintings to die.
Well said, Prowler.
It's interesting to imagine what sort of art might be produced by a Horowitzian painter. (This is a task for the imagination, because artists are necessarily open-minded people who express what they feel rather than what the government wants them to think.)
Such art would surely consist of crude, comic-book portrayals of glorious, innocent white heros defeating grotesque, dark-skinned, bearded arabs who epitomize Evil in eternal battle.
In other words, it would look like Soviet or Chinese propaganda art from the 1950s.
Of course, all of this is sheer speculation, because there aren't any Horowizian artists, and there won't be until the droning totalitarians have completely destroyed the last remnants of Amerian culture once and for all.
Very good Carl,
Thank you for the glimpse into 'your' mind.
But these future Horowitzian painters have already made an appearance.
Admitted their art is crude and lacks technique but crayon can limit you artistic skills. Their modest works of art mainly show the mounted raiders of the Janjaweed slaughtering their mothers and fathers from camel and horseback, a few helicopters and such (you know,things that happen as state policy on a daily basis and not drama queen imaginings).
This is an absurd excersize in vanity by the left. Years from now Abu Gharib will be studied as an excersize in press hysteria.
Now I want to see a painting of John Kerry crossing into Cambodia with his magic hat. Now that would be a more apporpriate paining. Perhaps John Kerry crossing the Delaware instead of Washington.
For warren:
Presumably you are unaware that the Bush mafia recently rolled out the red carpet for one of Osama bin Laden's former partners, Sudan's intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Gosh was Osama's designated minder in the 1990s, when the ex-CIA ally was comfortably ensconced in Sudan. Gosh is also accused – by members of his own government– of directing military attacks on civilians in Sudan's Darfur region, where the Janjaweed militia is carrying out a government-backed "ethnic cleansing" program of rape, pillage and murder against the region's black Muslims.
Thus, the Sudanese artists, insofar as they care about things like human suffering and truth more than raw power as manifested in the capacity for mass violence, are anything but Bushists, and therefore, presumably, not Horowitzian either.
Seriously, can you name one single important artist who is a Bush supporter?
(Hint for the philistines who read this blog: There aren't any.)
carl asks: can you name one single important artist who is a Bush supporter?
Carl, factor in the overwhelming liberal tendency in universities, journalism, people in public service, etc.
Can you name one single important newspaper or broadcast TV network that leans Bushward?
Which artists and writers will be considered important by the other liberals? The dynamic at work here - no whine, just fact - is that accomplished intellectuals publish in, say, The New Criterion, and are ignored by the establishment, unless and until they publish a little something in a liberal bastion publication like New York Times Review of Books.
These are the worldwide liberal elites that gave us the "good ideas" of a feckless UN and increased tolerance toward Saddam Hussein's reign of fear.
It is American conservatives who deplore Castro's Cuba, for example. President Bush represents freedom, giving courage to those resisting tyranny.
Even if the art world, such as is visible to the liberal academy, never acknowledges it, the world is being changed for the better.
Contrary to what Botero said, the United States is not a model of compassion, nor does it strive to be.
Oh, and actor Ron Silver is an outspoken Bush supporter.
More on Botero by Christopher Hitchens: Abu Ghraib Isn't Guernica
Carl said...
Presumably you are unaware that the Bush mafia recently rolled out the red carpet for one of Osama bin Laden's former partners, Sudan's intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh, according to the Los Angeles
Times.
Oh! There are two reliable sources and of course they are unbiased and uninterested, merely spouting cheap rhetoric because they are bored...or something.
If it were true, it could represent quite an intelligence coup. More likely, it is one of those, "Bush flew Osama's family...", stories.
"Thus, the Sudanese artists, insofar as they care about things like human suffering and truth more than raw power as manifested in the capacity for mass violence, are anything but Bushists, and therefore, presumably, not Horowitzian either."
Truth, Carl? The truth is those Sudanese, "artists", were the children of Darfur that had watched their mothers raped, (some had been raped themselves), fathers tortured, murdered then sexually mutilated.
They had a real idea of what torture is and not a silly political one which you seem to hold. They are real people and they have a greater understanding of the truth than you will probably ever have. They have been abandoned by the left and those leftist institutions that you imply you hold dear. Quite frankly, we have our plates full and your silly fantization of David Horowitz and Mr Bush as some kind of uber fascist/racists, to be nonsense.
"Gosh is also accused (by members of his own government) of
directing military attacks on civilians in Sudan's Darfur
region,...
I wonder why his own people would seek to link him to... hmmm. Could it be an attempt to discredit anything he says? Oh no, couldn't be. Everyone knows about the Bush Mafia, (or whatever prattle is stylish this week).
Presume away! Keep throwing mud, something will stick.
Seriously, can you name one single important artist who is a Bush supporter?
And please tell me why I should care?
Why would a true artist care about elitist attitudes and "Art" that is judged on its political content instead of its artistic merits? I know this was how it worked in the old USSR but that place is no more, or is their a rebirth coming.
Quit frankly this piece of, "Art", sterile and boorish. This is the type of cartoon, (not to insult cartoons), that I would expect to find inside a leftist political tract.
No doubt, it will bring great adulation among the caviar socialists whom buy his works.
I am afraid that there is no market for that, "important artist who is a Bush supporter". If there are any, they create for the arts sake. If there are such artists, they firmly keep their mouths shut and politics to themselves; if they wish to be acknowledged.
What would these imaginary Bushite artists portray? Perhaps the works of Karl Marx burred in a pile of excrement... No, that would be redundant.
Maybe the collected works of Robert Sheer dripping blood... No, that would be too obvious after that whole Cuba, North Korea and Cambodian killing fields thing.
How about a portrait of Chairman Mao standing atop the bodies of millions of Chinese? No, no, too passe.
Carl>> Is the adjective "important" the be-all end-all? Who defines "important"? I have to assume that by "important" you mean "accepted by the ossified leftist art complex" and/or praised by leftist newspapers.
I've read quite a few articles on how the "important" art racket is run (go see TAE and Newsmax especially on the Cuba angle) and how the inhabitants purposefully drive out rightists in general. So don't preach to me about how important artists aren't Bush supporters. We are. (I'm a writer and a musician myself. Hi. Nice to meet you.) You might want to ask your putsch-happy buddies in the art complex why they fear divergent views so strenuously that they run things like a Soviet gulag.
Seriously, can you name one single important artist who is a Bush supporter?
Well, if you want to count op-ed artists, there's always Bob Lang.
J
Seriously, can you name one single important artist who is a Bush supporter?
Seriously, can you name any politicians that should be taken more seriously because an artist likes them?
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