Would you like to hang that Jon McNaughton oil painting of Barack Obama grimacing while burning the Constitution in your home? (Perhaps in the guest bathroom?) First of all, too bad, because Sean Hannity already bought it; second of all, you couldn’t afford it anyway. BuzzFeed reports that McNaughton is selling his original anti-Obama masterpieces for roughly $300,000 each, a true triumph of capitalism over the evils of socialism.
There are lots of things to say about McNaughton’s elaborate paintings. One is that they’re pretty racist. Not so, says McNaughton:
>“You hear it so much, it’s like wow, whatever. I can’t help the fact President Obama is partly African American. He’s fanning the flames … It’s a very dark painting.”
Art-industry folks tell BuzzFeed that there are only about a hundred artists in the world that can garner the kind of money McNaughton is charging for his work, even though New York art critic Jerry Saltz called the paintings “visually dead as a doornail.”
McNaughton, who attended Brigham Young University on a full arts scholarship, brushed off the criticism:
“I don’t expect to get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or be in a museum, at least in my lifetime. It’s like having those experts in jazz criticize country music. One type of art trying to tell everyone else what real art is.”
