If the Smithsonian declines to display your enormous lurid ugly painting, do you have a legal case against it for declining? My guess would be no, because there is no obligation in law to display all paintings that are offered. Just think what art museums and galleries would be like if there were.
An artist called Julian Raven thinks otherwise.
A Trump portraitist whose lawsuit against the Smithsonian Institution and National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet was thrown out in December is appealing the district court’s decision, arguing that his work deserves to be shown in the hallowed institution.
Yeah see I don’t think that’s something you can argue in a legal sense. I don’t think that’s a legal category.
“It’s remarkable. It is dramatic. And I believe it has the fingerprints of divine providence upon it,” said artist Julian Raven in a homemade video explaining why he was inspired to create a 300-pound, 16-foot-long painting of president Donald Trump.
Well there you go – what if the Smithsonian doesn’t have 16 feet of wall space available? What if the floors aren’t up to a new 300 pounds? Fingerprints of divine providence notwithstanding?
After 600 hours of labor, Raven’s opus, Unafraid and Unashamed, was complete, and it has been making the rounds at Republican rallies for the past few years. Most recently, it appeared at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) where it lit up the Twittersphere, served as the literal backdrop for the right-wing meetup.
Raven believes that his work deserves national recognition, and should hang alongside paintings of other presidents in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The artist has been mired in a legal battle with the Smithsonian since 2017, claiming that the government institution is violating his First Amendment rights.
No. I’m not a lawyer, obviously, but I know the First Amendment ≠ national museums are required to display everything that is offered to them. Everybody knows that.
According to court documents, Raven first applied to have his portrait displayed as part of Trump’s inauguration in 2017. When he was rebuffed by the Rockwell Museum (an affiliate of the Smithsonian), he contacted the National Portrait Gallery’s director, Kim Sajet.
In the filings, Raven describes a hostile conversation that ended with rejection on the grounds that his magnum opus painting was too big, too pro-Trump, and not a very good painting.
That’s putting it very politely. It’s a hideous painting.
See for yourself.
Pro-Trump artist Julian Raven is waging legal war against the @smithsonian for rejecting his magnum opus: https://t.co/JXAQQrsGkc pic.twitter.com/JhYp7mudpC
— Artnet (@artnet) March 14, 2019
Comments
20 responses to “The fingerprints of divine providence”
That in the Smithsonian? HA!
Now if he were trying to work as a counsellor at a trape crisis center, he’d have acase.
Do they…do they *not see* how fascist they look? Or do they just not care?
Actually that painting is perfectly and appropriately gauche for the subject. It is a suitably adolescent image expressing the immaturity and underdeveloped mind of individual it was made to glorify.
The fascism is feature, not a bug.
Is that on black velvet?
Where’s Jesus?
Gah. I read B&W via RSS, which blocks many pictures. I opened the web site for this post and SAW THE PAINTING. Traumatized, I tell you.
I figure Jesus is out of frame, or behind one of the spectators.
Isn’t the eagle facing the wrong way?
https://ecowatchroar-img.rbl.ms/simage/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.rbl.ms%2F6473798%2F980x.jpg/2000%2C2000/uNZc8JYK4C02lPH8/img.jpg
The Smithsonian is notoriously picky. That doesn’t appear to be painted on real black velvet, as opposed to an imitation.
It’s the same problem they had with that one of Santa Claus reading a Bible. Artists — don’t cut corners on materials!
There’s such a thing as a “public forum” — not all government property has to be open to speech, but if the government allows people to post messages or buy advertising space on government property, then First Amendment restrictions apply. That’s why you can hold a protest on the national Mall, but not inside the Pentagon.
But the Smithsonian is pretty clearly not a public forum — it isn’t open to all comers (or “all comers except those being discriminated against”). And the government is allowed to engage in speech itself, in which case it is not required to express both (or all) sides of an issue, so it can run ads saying “vaccinate your kids” without having to indulge the anti-vaxxers, or single out particular people for medals or awards, or choose which pieces or art it wishes to display.
You can make an argument that, as a matter of good government, the Smithsonian shouldn’t, for example, take down all portraits of presidents from Party X whenever Party Y controls the White House, but even that wouldn’t seem like much of a First Amendment claim to me. And this is a far cry from that.
Man, that is one ugly POS painting. Also, not remarkable art in terms of technique or expression. There are literally hundreds of thousands of artists who could turn out work of at least as much merit.
The artist chose his medium poorly. It would be better airbrushed on the side of a van.
The true artistic expression would then be clever cinematography and music as the van is crushed and put through a shredder.
As I’ve said before, I generally like patriotic schlock, but, even putting my feelings about a Trump aside, that is positively ghastly. The helmet hair, the misshapen ear, the cracks (not rips—cracks) in the flag, etc. Just horrible.
The ear! My god I hadn’t noticed that. What IS that? Looks like an invading ooky.
There is one detail the artist seems to have inadvertantly got right. The eagle, that symbol of ‘real’ America, appears desperate to distance itself from Trump.
Bumt where’s the tanning booth ggoggls’ white circles around Trump’s eyes vanished to?
Wow, that ear looks like either a human finger or a scorpion’s tail. Also, why does the eagle have the same sheen as the flag, are they both made out of shiny silk? And why are some of its flight feathers angled forward? And I bet this painter was imagining, while depicting the eagle with mouth agape, that the eagle was making that piercing skreeeeeeeee cry, with no knowledge that that is the cry of a red hawk.
And check out that wall; going by the use of shadow to lend height, that thing must be a kilometer or two tall.
Fingerprints of Divine Providence? See, that’s what happens when you handle a painting before it’s completely dry.
I found Him. The left eyebrow.
That picture is so tasteless, so utterly ghastly, that if there weren’t so many eyes on the Trump Foundation ‘charity’ it would now be hanging in Trump Towers.