which I first saw some time ago in the BYU bookstore basement and had to suppress an urge to vomit. Now, I'm all for the USA, and believe that the Constitution is wonderful and was, as they say, divinely inspired. But I do take issue with the extent to which Christ is here conflated with the U.S. government & founding fathers. I think that when Christ comes to earth, the message He delivers is going to be something other than the Constitution.
The article in the Student Review centered on a more recent painting of McNaughton's, which looks like this,
and is equally maddening. Not because I worship Obama, though I definitely think this painting villainizes him unnecessarily. In fact, it took me reading more of McNaughton's comments below this picture where I found it online to realize why I really fundamentally hate these pictures: “I’m not trying to create an art style," he says. "I want to communicate my ideas. Isn’t that the purpose of art?”
Is it? The very fact that he would ask that question kind of rubs me the wrong way; if he went through the entire BFA program at BYU (which he did, according to a the Student Review interview), shouldn't he have developed a slightly more complicated conception of "the purpose of art"--if there even is a purpose? Oscar Wilde would certainly take issue with that. Actually, I'm sure there are almost as many ideas of the purpose of art as there are people, and it's not as if I am an expert. But to say it's purpose is to communicate his ideas--his political ideas, nonetheless--does seem much too facile.
I think the first criteria for art should be: Is it pretty? And I don't think Mr. McNaughton's work is very. After that, we can ask ourselves what the artist is trying to say or whatever, if he or she wants to say something. And if conveying a message is your goal, artist, at least don't insult your viewers by making the work's meaning so sickeningly obvious.
“I hope my work will create conversation and reach people on a deeper level,” McNaughton says on his website. “I like to use metaphor and multiple levels of meaning to reach my viewer. If it makes them think and feel, then it is successful.” Wow--so deep!--I wonder what you could be trying to say by depicting Obama with his foot on the Constitution while Roosevelt and Clinton, standing at his left, clap in the background? These are metaphors that a fourth-grader could interpret upon his or her introduction to figurative language.
So I may not be able to articulate exactly what constitutes good art, but I'm pretty sure that this stuff is bad.
Haha. Yeah, this is pretty funny. I don't really like these paintings either. And here is the ultimately irony: I have a real problem when people just 100% hate things, like this guy who seems to hate Democrats/Obama pretty thoroughly. To me it's a sign of an uneducated mind when you can't synthesize two sides of an argument and recognize that each side has some merits. But yet, I almost 100% hate this painting. So I'm being a hypocrite. But I feel justified because he is so narrow-minded. But now I have just created a vicious circle because someone can thoroughly hate me because I am being so narrow-minded. So how do we climb out of this hole? I think what we have here is a failure of rhetoric. Looking back to my freshman Writing 150 hand book, rhetoric is at work "when language does the work of influence, when it influences ideas, attitudes and actions." Neither McNaughton or I are allowing ourselves to be persuaded by good arguments or putting out good arguments because we are so biased, hence no rhetoric.
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