I wanted to honor this season of love, light, hope and peace by writing something good about Donald Trump. My mother used to insist that good can be found in everyone if you just look hard enough. After two days of Google searches, I gave up.
But lo, this is a season of miracles. No, a star in the east did not infuse me with wisdom. The epiphany came from a story about an art gallery. My mom was right. I had finally found something good to say about our newly impeached 45thpresident. (Insert drumroll here.)
Donald John Trump is a work of art. Really. The revelation hit me as I read about renowned artist Maurizio Cattelan selling a banana duct-taped to a wall for $120,000. In fact, he sold multiple copies of his exhibit displayed at the Art Basel Miami fair. To be clear, the buyers each got a banana and a piece of duct tape; the wall was not included.
Why, you may ask, would a duct-taped banana be considered art? The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic, Sebastian Smee, has the answer: “It’s not the banana . . . that constitutes the art. It’s the grotesqueness of the sale and ensuing spectacle (which included a performance artist freeing the banana from the tape and eating it), and more specifically, it’s the idea that the system is absurd.”
Smee’s explanation was the closest I will ever get to a star-in-the-east moment. Trump’s presidency has been nothing if not grotesque. The past three years of his administration was a spectacle beyond our wildest imaginations. Roll it all together and what do you get? An orange-tinted, red-tie-wearing work of art that oozes absurdity through its every pore. Donald Trump: not exactly Rodin’s The Thinker, but a genuine piece of art nevertheless.
With that in mind, my gift to you for these tumultuous times, is a collection of Trump art, accompanied not by dreary and predictable political analysis, but by astute, insightful and discerning art criticism:
PAPERING MARIA. This allegorical piece, simmering and seething in dramatic contrast, is no more about a president throwing out paper towels to Puerto Rican hurricane victims than Cattelan’s work was about bananas and duct tape. This work is a bold depiction of powerlessness, of a president so inept and clueless that he brings paper towels to a hurricane-ravaged island, and of the Puerto Rican people who were denied real help by their government because the Bounty Man thought they were foreigners.
NATO TUSSLE. Nothing says feng shui to Trump like shoving aside a fellow world leader so he could hold the front and center position in a NATO photograph. Poor Dusko Markovic from Montenegro was pushed aside by Trump as the NATO gang prepared for a group portrait in 2017. This is quite reflective of the Donald’s unique taste in aesthetics, namely that reverential beauty can be achieved only if it’s about him.
THE QUID-PRO-QUO GIFT. This protracted – and still ongoing – work of performance art is at once whimsical and profound, one part Proust and one part Marx Brothers. Gordon Sondland, a rich hotel magnate who was never fond of Trump, nevertheless contributed $1 million to the president’s inaugural fund because he desperately wanted to become an ambassador in order to fill his life with meaning and purpose (the Proust part). In exchange for Sondland’s quid, Trump gifted him the European Union Ambassadorship as his quo. Before he knew it, Sondland was knee-deep in political chicanery involving Ukraine, Trump, Rick Perry and Rudy Giuliani (the Marx Brothers part). Long story short: Sondland first said Trump told him there was no quid-pro-quo on the Ukrainian stuff, but then, to avoid perjury charges, testified that there was a quid-pro-quo. Although the arc of this performance piece is frustratingly long, its narrative is apt and accessible. It is, indeed, a bold morality play about the ephemeral nature of political relationships. It’s warning is clear: Before you hand over the quid be sure you can handle the quo.
HEARING WITHOUT LISTENING. Although Trump’s meeting with Iraqi human rights activist Nydia Murad and her cohort marked a rare Oval Office visit by women, the ensuing photograph brilliantly depicts an unbalanced composition on virtually every sensory level. Murad won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for speaking out about her torture and rape while in Islamic State captivity. She and her fellow activists are shown engaged and totally in the moment as they focus on pleading their case in the White House. Trump sits in silence, averting any eye contact with his guests. It was as if he had no idea who they were, why they were there and when he could get back to watching Fox and Friends. The gestalt effect of this group picture perfectly captures the enormous space between this president and the rest of the world.
WORDS WITHOUT MEANING. Writing, of course, is its own art form. Presidential words last as long as great literature. George Washington wrote: “Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.” Abraham Lincoln wrote: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” John F. Kennedy wrote: “The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.” On the eve of his impeachment, Donald Trump sent a torturous, rambling six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with the stated intent that his words last for 100 years. It had all of the coherence and eloquence of the Unabomber’s manifesto. His artfulness with the written word was characterized with an overabundance of exclamation points and modifiers. It was filled with terms like “spiteful”, “unfettered contempt”, “egregious conduct”, “disingenuous,” “meritless”, “baseless”, and “a terrible thing”. And that was only the first page. From an artistic standpoint, however, the missive drew an accurate portrait of the 45thpresident for anyone interested in looking at it in 2119. He showed himself to be the man we know only too well: inarticulate, inaccurate, dishonest, angry and self-obsessed.
Yet, Trump is, indeed, a work of art. And that is as close as I can come to saying something good about him. There is, however, a caveat. Although Sebastian Smee, the Washington Post art critic, insisted that the duct-taped banana is art, he also noted that such a label, alone, does not speak to its quality. In other words there is good art and bad art.
Donald Trump is really bad art. Sorry, Mom.