Author Topic: Obama Art  (Read 143728 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Obama Art
« Reply #330 on: April 24, 2009, 09:07:36 am »


Alo posted in the 'Current Events' thread: http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,35551.0.html


http://www.slate.com/id/2216632/

The White House Canon
Photographs from the rotating collection at the White House.
By John Dickerson
Posted Wednesday, April 22, 2009, at 11:57 AM ET



President Obama can't walk very far from his office without being confronted by a picture of himself. One hundred and forty-seven frames hang throughout the White House, displaying images of the daily life of his presidency. Known as "jumbos," the 20-by-30-inch prints are a long-standing presidential tradition that goes back to the Nixon administration. These pictures don't hang in the grand spaces of the White House. They line the hallways and staircases of the cramped quarters where the work gets done. There are grand offices in the White House, but much of the work area is dim, with low ceilings and such crowded work spaces that it almost seems as if the staff sit two to a chair.

Most of the jumbos are not formal photographs but candid views into the daily business of the presidency. "We want to show the president, not just photo-op situations," says White House photographer Pete Souza.

It would be hard, with so many of these photos hanging around, not to let the pictures go to your head. Obama, who photographs well, is usually captured in the most commanding way. It also helps that Souza, who also worked in the Reagan White House, has been photographing Obama for some time. He's also got perhaps the best material since the Kennedy administration. "I'm envious of Souza," says former White House photographer David Hume Kennerly. "You couldn't cast a situation better: an attractive couple, the first black president, two kids, the dog."

But the photographs aren't just for the president. They're for the staffers who don't get to see him much. Those who are captured in a photograph with Obama—from White House stewards to speechwriters to journalists—get the thrill of being on public display. And when the photographs are rotated out, as they are every few days, the subjects can hang the picture in their own offices.



When President Obama walked downstairs to his office on his first day of work, he encountered a wall full of pictures from his inauguration the day before.
His staff of photographers stayed up through the night printing pictures so that Obama wouldn't face empty walls and lonely hooks in his new office.



The president examines the door in his desk through which John F. Kennedy Jr. peeked in the famous Stanley Tretick photograph.
Caroline Kennedy, once a White House resident, wears a blue badge with an "A," signifying she is a visitor.
The iconic photograph of her brother is the kind of shot a photographer lives for: a glimmer of the personal and private in the most public life in America.



This is the iconic photograph so far of the Obama administration.
You've almost certainly seen it. Still, it's one of White House photographer Pete Souza's favorites and hangs in his office.
"You can see he's taken his coat off and put it on her shoulders because it's a little chilly in the elevator, and then there's the little touching of the forehead.
You see the guys in the background trying not to look. It's a private moment in a semipublic moment."



The president fixes Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's tie.
Aides look on at the president in a familiar composition: He is the center of their attention.




Obama speaks with adviser David Axelrod in the staff workroom while in Strasbourg, France.
"Twenty years ago I would have been zooming in here," says Souza, pointing to the president and his aide.
"But what's interesting is all the other stuff going on while he's talking to Axelrod."
In this picture we also see a glimpse of the president in a private posture.
In public, he'd probably stand a little straighter, while Axelrod, a longtime and trusted adviser, might not poke him with his finger.



This is the kind of picture an administration aide lives for.
Here Obama talks to Denis McDonough, director of strategic communications at the National Security Council.
As a composition, the photo includes none of the pomp or fancy trappings of the presidency.
Even the most powerful man in the world holds meetings in rooms with garish carpets and cinderblock walls.



"Arne missed that shot, didn't he?" asked the president
when he saw this picture of his attempt to put pressure on Education Secretary Arne Duncan.



This meeting of wingtips will now be called to order: Even when the president is not in the shot, he's the center of things.
Here, the shoes of his advisers (but not of the president) encircle the Oval Office rug.



Once again, President Obama is nowhere in the picture, but he is the center of the convesation.
Aboard Air Force One as it travels to Baghdad in April are Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (pointing his finger);
National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones (on the phone to Emanuel's right);
adviser David Axelrod (standing behind Emanuel); Presidential Scheduler Alyssa Mastromonaco (next to Axelrod);
Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff (seated to Emanuel's left); Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Joe Clancy (pointing back at Emanuel);
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs (standing behind Messina); and National Security Council Chief of Staff Mark Lippert, background-right.



Find the president: As a reporter takes shorthand in a crush of press in the Oval Office,
a blurry Obama can be seen just to the left of another reporter's glasses.



Michelle Obama waits as the president, background,
signs the guest book upon their arrival to Prague Castle, April 5, 2009, in the Czech Republic.



Ham: Obama uses a photographer's camera to take a picture of
Treasury Department Communications Director Stephanie Cutter backstage in Mesa, Ariz., on Feb. 18, 2009.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Obama Art
« Reply #331 on: May 07, 2009, 02:18:50 pm »





Salon composite/AP Photo



http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2009/05/07/obama_spock/
Obama is Spock: It's quite logical
Our president bears a striking resemblance to the rational "Star Trek" Vulcan whose mixed race made him cultural translator to the universe.

By Jeff Greenwald
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Obama Art
« Reply #332 on: May 10, 2009, 12:45:06 am »


Also posted in Current Events, Obama = Spock: http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,35813.msg510041.html#msg510041




http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/opinion/10dowd.html

Op-Ed Columnist
Put Aside Logic
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 9, 2009 
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Obama Art
« Reply #333 on: May 10, 2009, 09:29:34 am »


Paint the White House Black (Obama Tribute)
An audio/video tribute to the 44th President of the United States of America,
Barack Obama featuring the 1993 smash hit "Paint the White House Black" 
by funk singer George Clinton.



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kEaKCCGPWc&feature=related[/youtube]
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Artiste

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Re: Obama Art
« Reply #334 on: May 10, 2009, 08:51:11 pm »
Interesting!

Merci!
Hugs!

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Obama Art
« Reply #335 on: May 11, 2009, 05:06:22 am »


[





And now a conservative spins the meme:


Michael Ramirez, Investor's Business Daily
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Obama Art
« Reply #336 on: May 31, 2009, 01:02:57 pm »


During the previous administration, [Mr. Lacey] said, he had also tried his hand at some portraits of George W. Bush but added, in a tone that mingled regret with professional candor, “You really couldn’t sell them.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/arts/design/31pain.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=obama%20art&st=cse


Obama’s Face (That’s Him?)
Rules the Web


VIRTUAL GALLERY: "Fountain of Hope"
President Obama has captured the imagination of artists worldwide, and many are finding an audience online.


Gary Rogers Wares with Obama art he bought on eBay; the paintings are by Dan Lacey, and the nesting dolls
came from Russia.

By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: May 30, 2009

Mimi Torchia Boothby
’s job as a technician puts her outside a wind tunnel every weekday at the Boeing plant south of Seattle, but in her free time two years ago she took up watercolors. Among her favorite subjects are cats, idyllic scenes of Italy — and, of course, Barack Obama, whose contemplative, sun-splashed portrait she completed a few weeks after his election as president.

She was so happy with it she started offering fine prints of it on the Web, her first proud professional act as an artist, and has since sold more than two dozen at $40 apiece. “Talk about viral,” Ms. Boothby, 57, said. “Most of the people who bought them were people I didn’t even know.”

Perhaps not since John F. Kennedy, whose dusty portraits can still be seen in kitchens and barbershops and alongside the antique beer cans at bars like Manuel’s Tavern in Atlanta, has a presidency so fanned the flames of painterly ardor among hobbyist and professional artists.

Mr. Obama’s campaign was well known for inspiring art, including Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous “Hope”  poster, a version of which is now in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Months after the election, with the glow of the administration’s first 100 days dimming, it might have been expected that enthusiasm for Obama art would be dimming, too.

Yet the still-ample offerings of original paintings of the president and the first family on eBay and at places like the annual Affordable Art Fair in New York — along with a crop of presidential-art-obsessed Internet sites including obamaartreport.com, artofobama.com and, inevitably, badpaintingsofbarackobama.com — are indications that it might just be a growth industry.

The phenomenon has been a boon to the near-anonymous painting factories crowded together in the suburbs of Shenzhen, China, famous for cranking out copies of masterpieces, along with landscapes and semitasteful nudes. Another one, seemingly based in Germany, offers stately Obamas amid air-brushy likenesses of Tupac Shakur, Bruce Lee and Al Pacino (in his “Scarface”  role), advertised as “real hand-embellished” paintings on canvas.

Market interest has also helped small-time artists like Dan Lacey, of tiny Elko, Minn., a self-described disillusioned conservative who made a name for himself last year in the blogosphere with his inexplicably strange portraits of Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin depicted with pancakes stacked on top of their heads.

Lately, he has turned to Mr. Obama, cranking out both eBay-ready conventional portraits — “I hate to say this, but I can do ones like that in about an hour,” he said — and even stranger works that have tended toward portrayals of the 44th president naked on a unicorn, often performing gallant deeds like wrestling a bear on Wall Street or taking the controls of the US Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River.

“There’s a consistent demand for Obama, both for things that are funny and also for the serious, sort of Aaron Shikler kinds of treatments,” said Mr. Lacey, referring to the artist who painted well-known portraits of the Kennedy family.

Among Mr. Lacey’s eBay customers are Carla Pasley, an administrator for a consumer products company in Kansas City, Mo., who said she is generally apolitical but bought an Obama portrait simply because she found it “really pretty,” and Gary Rogers Wares, a manager at a stationery and gift manufacturer in Culver City, Calif., who has a gold-hued Obama in his office behind his desk and just won another one at auction for $28.

“I wanted a painting because it’s something unique, and as far as I’m concerned it’s unique, just like our president is,” Mr. Wares said. “This is historic and you want something that feels like an heirloom.”

The White House, asked if the president and first lady commonly received gifts of paintings of themselves, responded with characteristic reticence: “On background, I can pass along that among other things, the Obamas are given works of art that include images of the President and symbols from the campaign,” a spokesman wrote.

If Mr. Obama has not yet fixed the country’s economy or solved its security problems, he at least seems to have postponed the withering of original art’s “aura,” or power, in a world of easy reproduction, as famously foreseen by the philosopher Walter Benjamin.

Indeed, a 90-day search by eBay under the category of Obama paintings, most of them original creations, not posters or prints, found 787 works offered for sale from mid-February to mid-May, generating almost $20,000 at an average price of $118 a painting, said Karen Bard, a spokeswoman. Production generally seems to be running well ahead of demand.

High-dollar works by well-known artists seem not to fare as well — an Obama painting by Peter Max listed with a buy-it-now price of $17,000 has had no takers so far. But paintings in a wild variety of styles — Cubist, Pop, post-Impressionist, folk arty, street arty and what might be described as neo-Tolkienesque — have sold in the two-figure and even three-figure range.

Gabriel McGovern, a Web designer in Portland, Ore., who started artofobama.com during the presidential campaign last summer, said he had not intended to continue it past the election but had been receiving such a steady stream of submissions — commercial works, personal works, works photographed on the streets, 300 or so images of paintings and other kinds of art that he has not yet had time to post — that he decided to keep the site going.

“My favorites are the first-time painters,” he said. “It might not even really look like Obama — in fact, not much at all — but they not only paint it, they go out and find a forum on the Web where they can post it so everyone can see it.”

Ms. Boothby said she is now managing to make a little money on the side with her brushes and easel and credits Mr. Obama. “I think that portrait I did of the president was kind of a touchstone for my confidence, painting-wise,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “I’m not sure I would have been able to start doing commissions if I hadn’t gotten as warm a reception as I did for that one painting.”

Mr. Lacey, who admits to parting with paintings for as little as $1 on the Web, said he sold his president-wrestling-a-bear fantasia for $600 and recently received a commission for a unicorn-themed Obama. He intends to ride the surging presidential art wave as long as it will keep him afloat.

During the previous administration, he said, he had also tried his hand at some portraits of George W. Bush but added, in a tone that mingled regret with professional candor, “You really couldn’t sell them.”




http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/05/31/arts/20090531-OBAMA_index.html



Paintings of President Obama



"Pop Painting"




"Team Player"












"Looking Presidential"




"Git it Done"
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Obama Art
« Reply #337 on: June 07, 2009, 01:47:28 am »



http://blacksnob.blogspot.com/2008/10/extreme-obama-paris-fashion-week.html

Extreme Obama: Paris Fashion Week






"Wear at your own risk, kiddies! This little number is by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac for his Spring 2009 collection."
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Obama Art
« Reply #338 on: June 21, 2009, 01:54:36 am »


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/20/new-jibjab-obama-video-ob_n_218477.html

New JibJab Obama Video:
Obama Saves The Day (VIDEO)





He's Barack Obama
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVFdAJRVm94&eurl=[/youtube]
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Meryl

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Re: Obama Art
« Reply #339 on: June 21, 2009, 11:08:22 am »
You beat me to it, John!  Funny video, eh?  ;D
Ich bin ein Brokie...