Julia Friedman

In 1993, three months after Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords, the Canadian magazine Maclean’s published what was soon to become an iconic photograph. It shows the backs of two boys in brotherly embrace, overlooking a blurred-out Jerusalem cityscape. The boy on the right is sporting a yarmulke, the one on the left a keffiyeh. The picture came to symbolize hope for the future because, as everyone knows, the future belongs to the children. As it turned out, however, the symbol was hollow, and the hope was manufactured—both boys were Israeli Jews. When confronted about this deception, the creator of the image, American photojournalist Ricki Rosen, said that “it was never supposed to be a documentary photo,” but a “symbolic portrayal of the idea of a long road to peace.” Apparently, Rosen had been following the instructions of her photo editor, who even provided a sketch of the desired composition. The Toronto-based editor cannot have been familiar with Middle Eastern dress codes, since the boy’s keffiyeh was secured with an agal, normally reserved for older men.  But in 2014, the image was compelling enough for Rihanna to tweet it out during yet another conflict between Israel and Gaza. The photo spread further, not only through some 46,000 retweets of her post, but also through other online publications. And that is when the two boys in the photograph (now thirty-something-year-old men) were interviewed about their modeling gig of two decades earlier. 

The 2014 resurgence of the faked 1993 photo is an excellent example of how propaganda works. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines propaganda as “the more or less systematic effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions by means of symbols (words, gestures, banners, monuments, music, clothing, insignia, hairstyles, designs on coins and postage stamps, and so forth).” Propagandists “deliberately select facts, arguments, and displays of symbols and present them in ways they think will have the most effect.” Hence the use of children (innocent of prior history and symbolizing the future) in the headwear of the two respective groups (representing the collective) in the Maclean’s photo. Propagandists often envision themselves as educators, believing that “they are uttering the purest truth,” while the recipients of propaganda may see the message as both truthful and educational. Not realizing it was a fake, Rihanna must have thought that the photo was a constructive symbol of the hope for peace, and a good way to compensate for her earlier #FreePalestine tweet, which she deleted due to backlash after only eight minutes. According to the Britannica, “‘true believers’—dogmatic reactors to dogmatic religious, social or political propaganda”—are conditioned to trust whatever is being preached, because they are already sitting in the choir stalls.

Our information environment has changed dramatically since 2014. The social jolts of #MeToo in 2017 and #BLM in 2020 were strengthened by the rapid rise of an attention economy that dictates  social media use. Since our attention is a limited resource, social media platforms from X through Instagram and Facebook to Reddit endlessly hone their persuasive techniques to motivate users to revisit their sites, create friendship networks, and affirm their social virtue—by, for example, changing their avatars to black squares en masse after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. Following the massacre of 7 October, there has been a renewed push to assign everyone on these platforms to committed camps. And conveniently, there is a new contender for the most effective weapon in the propaganda wars: photorealistic, generative AI art. 

About a week after Hamas slaughtered more than 1,400 Israelis, a user of the AI platform Midjourney created a reddit post entitled “Visions of Peace.” It features ten images, all of which show smiling and hugging people—both children and adults—who can be identified by the their dress as Arabs and Jews. In one image, a girl and a boy are sitting by the seaside. To ensure that there is no doubt about their respective group affiliations, the girl is wearing an oversized Star of David necklace, while the boy’s head is covered with a keffiyeh. This display of symbols presumably reflects the verbal prompt that generated the image—probably something along the lines of “Jewish girl and Palestinian boy smiling and embracing by the sea.”

While it is photorealistic, the image is replete with improbable details that result from the AI’s translation of language prompts into unrefined visual renderings. The girl’s necklace is preposterously large, and her Star of David is the size of the crosses worn by Orthodox priests. The boy is dressed like an old man—white button-up shirt, dress coat, and a keffiyeh secured with an agal—the same sartorial inaccuracy as in the staged 1993 photograph. The children’s oddly intertwined fingers are a telltale AI flaw, as is the mismatched landscape in the background. AI is still learning the tricks that were mastered by Western painters six centuries ago.

The comments on the initial post were overwhelmingly positive. Many Redditors recognized and welcomed the propagandistic nature of the image of the two children. One commentator even spells it out: “This is the kind of propaganda we need!” He had his wish, as the image was shared and reshared numerous times across social media, often accompanied by emoji-filled, inspirational comments, such as “Pray for peace,” “Hate is learned, love is our nature,” and “We used to be friends.” There is clearly a market for images like this—easily legible (cue the jumbo necklace) virtual modifications of reality. But, thanks to the photorealistic nature of generative AI art, not everyone who liked and shared the image realized that it was simulated. The image pretends to be photography, and by association it pretends to be true to life. The story of Ricki Rosen’s staged 1993 photograph caused a stir at the time because back then people expected such an image to be a snapshot of two real-life friends hugging. That would have been a sign of real-life hope and inspiration, epitomized by two boys growing up in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords to coexist peacefully. When the conflict was reignited in 2014, the same image, improbably enough, was again used to urge peace and reconciliation. 

Now, in 2023, a second photo from the 1993 shoot is making the rounds. In it, two boys are hugging as they are walk towards the camera. Judging by the captions and comments on this second photograph, social media users don’t doubt its veracity. They assume it is an actual interaction because it is a photograph. Nor are they wrong to do so, since veracity has traditionally been key to photography, which has always proclaimed that truthfulness is its most fundamental feature. Painting—even the most accurately mimetic kind—is manufactured by the human hand directed by the human eye. Analogue photography, by contrast, relies on the machine that produces the image via light exposure and chemical reactions. When photography was pioneered in the 1830s, it purported to be the visual agent of truth. The famous pictorialist photographer Henry Peach Robinson was widely criticized for his infamous 1858 print Fading Away, composed of five separate negatives, showing a young woman in the last stages of consumption, surrounded by her grieving family. Since a photograph was meant to be recorded proof of an incident that took place in real life, Robinson’s contemporaries deemed that this “untruthful,” artistic, image was an insult to the duped viewer. 

Photorealistic AI-generated images, if recognized as such, should function as symbolic representations that invite the suspension of our disbelief. They should not be seen as photographs, and as therefore “truthful,” and they must remain separate from any context in which they could be confused with straight analogue or digital photographs. 

Among the images shared in the context of the current Gaza conflict was a photograph that I first spotted in one of my media feeds. It is a candid shot taken in Jerusalem seven years ago, by Russian-Israeli photographer Mikhail Levit (b. 1944). The photograph made me pause my doom-scroll and examine it carefully, because it contained something that Roland Barthes, in his gem of a book Camera Lucida, calls “punctum.” Barthes proposed that a truly great photograph must possess two components: studium and punctum. The former, he explains, is the result of a shared cultural interest, a reading of visual signs. The latter is a “sting, speck, cut,” an accidental detail that “pricks” and “bruises” the viewer. When we recognize the studium, we grasp the photographer’s intentions and share the photographer’s culture. The experience of punctum is of a different order.  It is emotional. It provokes pity, love, disgust, empathy, anger. 

Levit’s photograph shows two elderly gentlemen: a Jew and an Arab. They are engrossed in conversation—the Arab man is grasping his cane with his left hand and subtly gesticulating with his right, his face turned away from the camera; the Jewish man is holding a cigarette and leaning forward, listening intently. Neither of them is looking at the photographer. It is a candid snapshot of a moment in time. I found the photograph incredibly touching. I was struck by the similarity of their dusty shoes and worn-out hems, by the way their feet point towards each other. The two old men are of different cultures, but they could be brothers; so close are they to each other both physically and emotionally. Touching as it is, the photograph is hardly a poster advertising hope for resolving the Gaza conflict because the well-meaning sharer of the image was wrong in assuming that it depicted an Israeli and a Palestinian­—the men are clearly an Israeli Jew and an Israeli Arab. But even if Levit’s photograph does not apply to the current conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, it is still a powerful symbol of coexistence, because it captures an instance of peaceful interaction in real life. It is, in short, the truth.

 The real price of the faked hope represented by the overshared image from the “Visions of Peace” is that the audience is fooled. Instead of responding to the cultural complexity of the studium and the emotional jab of the punctum, the viewer fatuously follows a breadcrumb trail of propagandistic triggers. While a great photograph—be it analogue or digital—is likely to provoke thinking, a formulaic propaganda image tends to shut it down, sequestering its viewers in their respective echo chambers. Nuance and ambiguity don’t survive long when a picture is reduced to a visual slogan. All a visual slogan can do is keep those thumbs scrolling. 

The Balanchine Woman returns in a new production of the Los Angeles–based American Contemporary Ballet (acb), which just opened its twelfth season. The inaugural performance, succinctly titled The Rite (running through October 28), is an inspired homage to both Balanchine and the composer Igor Stravinsky. To read the full text click here.

The Joy of Painting—a TV series hosted by American artist Bob Ross, on which he would conjure up Alaskan landscapes in just 27 minutes of airtime—ran for 403 episodes between 1983 and 1994. Eventually syndicated to almost 300 PBS stations nationwide, it attracted over 80 million daily viewers of varying ages and backgrounds. According to research conducted by Bob Ross, Inc., only three percent of these viewers actually painted along with Ross. The rest just watched, mesmerized by the pioneer of autonomous sensory meridian response.

Ross’s hushed, melodic tones, the gentle rasp of his brush against canvas, and the scraping of his palette knife combined to send the audience into a pleasurable stupor as enchanting snowy mountains or verdant bluffs appeared before them on a double primed 18” x 24” canvas. Ross succumbed to blood cancer in 1995 at the age of 52, but on what would have been his 73rd birthday, Twitch.tv streamed a nine-day marathon of his show to a viewership of five and a half million. This added a fresh cohort of Millennials and Zoomers to his audience, and together with over 450 million views of The Joy of Painting on YouTube cemented his iconic status in 21st-century American culture.

With all this publicity, it was hardly a surprise when, in 2018, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “A Renaissance for Bob Ross: Fans want the ‘Joy of Painting’ Host to Have a Spot in Art History.”Ross’s advocates maintain that he deserves to be recognized as more than the mere educator and “television artist” he considered himself to be (at least according to the inscription on his tombstone). They see him as a canonical, prominent, and prolific landscape painter. I felt compelled to weigh in on this debate in a piece for the New Criterion, where I pointed out that, since museums now routinely celebrate artists using criteria such as preferred identity or social stance, the exclusion of Ross’s kitschy landscapes looked snobbish and disingenuous, if not outright discriminatory towards the middlebrow culture he personified.

The “happy clouds” and “happy trees,” about which Bob Ross murmured to his audience, were his way of demystifying painting. By bringing his workshop into the homes of his viewers, Ross liberated art from its elitist strongholds in museums and galleries. He boldly declared that “there is an artist hidden at the bottom of every single one of us” and that he would strive to reveal that hidden artist. This mission resonated with America’s populist spirit. Why shouldn’t the paintings of Bob Ross grace the walls of American museums alongside the works of Tanya Aguiñiga and Peter Bradley?

That is the question posed by filmmaker Joshua Rofé, the director of a 2021 feature-length Netflix documentary titled, Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed. Rofé had been wondering why some American artists thrive in any given period. He selected Ross to represent the prototypical ’80s artist over Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, or Keith Haring, who back then were omnipresent in the pages of the blue-chip Artforum magazine. But although Rofé’s documentary began as an evaluation of what made Ross massively popular, it ended up as a constrained exposé of Shakespearean-grade malevolence on the part of his business partners.

Annette and Walt Kowalski—the masterminds of what one of Ross’s close friends John Thamm calls “Grand Theft Bob”—have proved to be so litigious that, according to Rofé, five people slated to be interviewed for his film bailed out, for fear of being sued. The story, in all its splendid and detailed cruelty, was valiantly covered by the Daily Beast in a comprehensive article, Sex, Deceit, and Scandal: The Ugly War Over Bob Ross’ Ghost, published four months before the release of Rofé’s documentary. But for whatever reason, this remarkable essay disappeared under the radar, so in the run up to the film’s premiere fans continued to speculate about precisely who had betrayed whom.

Before I read the Daily Beast article, I expected that the story would be about Bob Ross betraying the original television painter Bill Alexander. Ross had studied under Alexander, then worked for him, and was even handed “the almighty brush” by his mentor on camera. When Ross’s fortunes rose, however, the men became rivals—as television painters and as promoters of lucrative art supplies— and their relationship soured. It probably did not help that, aside from adopting Alexander’s technique, Ross virtually copied his mentor’s entire line of materials. In a 1991 New York Times profile, Alexander’s bitterness was evident: “He betrayed me … I trained him and he is copying me—what bothers me is not just that he betrayed me, but that he thinks he can do it better.”

I spoke about this rift in an interview I gave for Rofé’s Netflix documentary, but the Ross-Alexander quarrel did not turn out to be the focus of the film. As the filmmakers interviewed those who knew and worked with Ross, they soon realized that the shenanigans of Bob Ross, Inc. were so preposterous that this story had to take precedence over Ross’s use of the alla prima technique or his all-American appeal. The heartbreaking tale of Ross scrambling to rewrite his will and protect his intellectual property, while enduring debilitating rounds of chemo and radiation therapy, became the documentary’s leitmotif. The plot involving Ross’s rivalry with Alexander seemed trivial in comparison.

The pivot towards human drama also meant that attention was diverted from Ross’s actual achievement of using the populist platform of television to democratize painting. He took one of the most complex and time-intensive activities known to man and made it appear simple and accessible. But tales of personal misdeeds make for more compelling entertainment. Given the amount of real-life drama around Ross, even the best-intentioned documentary treatment of his story is prone to focus on that drama at the expense of any other narrative. And if it is not the storytellers who succumb to the temptation of foregrounding human drama, the audience might misconstrue what they see on the screen as an ideological struggle du jour. This is unfortunately what happened with the latest cinematic depiction of the iconic painter.

In April 2023, writer-director Brit McAdams took another stab at the Bob Ross story in a film called Paint, which stars Owen Wilson as Carl Nargle, a Vermont- based TV painter modelled on Ross. McAdams’s film was panned by critics and received equally poor audience ratings. The New York Times described it as “a comedically inert parody of male privilege,” while others decided that Nargle was a “technology-averse sexual predator” and a “smooth operator,” guilty of “toxic male delusion” and “toxic self-deluded male myopia.” The public, meanwhile, was displeased by the film’s slow pace and its various “mistakes.”

Personally, I found Paint to be thought-provoking and funny, but a full understanding and appreciation of the film requires knowledge of both the art- world in-jokes and obscure facts about Bob Ross’s biography. That inevitably shrank the target audience down to the same size commanded by scholarly monographs—in the hundreds at best. Denizens of the professional art world might enjoy the philistinism of the film’s museum director, but these insiders are not Bob Ross aficionados and are likely to miss out on the Ross trivia that makes the film such a delight. Ross’s fans, on the other hand, have disliked the artistic liberties McAdams took with the facts of Ross’s life and were not receptive to the comic callousness of an emerging painter toadying up to an established older colleague while backstabbing him.

Those familiar with the details of Bob Ross’s life will see that, beyond the physical likeness and the mannerisms aped by Wilson, Nargle is equally revered by the elderly, the middle-aged, and the young. His admirers include the residents of a retirement home, a young man who tells Nargle that he has been “going to a special place” with him since he was nine, and a couple of slack-jawed barflies who gawp at Nargle’s show on the television set mounted above the liquor shelf. This is a neat detail, since Ross first encountered Bill Alexander’s TV painting lessons in an Alaskan bar. Bob Ross was himself such a barfly who took seriously Alexander’s promise that anyone could become a painter.

Nargle’s van seems to be another nod to Alexander, who drove a Volkswagen van that functioned as his home, studio, and gallery. He used its picture windows to display his paintings and had “The Old Master Painter from the Faraway Hills” inscribed on the side of the vehicle. In the film, the vanity plate on Nargle’s van reads, “PAINTR.” Ambrosia, the young woman who swoops in to supplant Nargle on his TV program spot, has “PAINTER” on her license plate, and Nargle mocks her for including the final “E,” explaining that a real artist would never spell such things out in that way. This seems to be a joke at the expense of the real Ross, a hotrod enthusiast who drove a silver 1969 Corvette with a vanity plate that simply read, “BOB ROSS.”

This is just one of the ways in which Paint turns the Bob Ross/Bill Alexander drama inside out. While Nargle is most obviously (if loosely) based on Ross, McAdams has incorporated elements of Bill Alexander’s story so that his protagonist ends up being a composite of the two men. Nargle is the one who ends up being pushed aside by his young protégé, as Ambrosia credits him with inspiring her to paint but believes she can do it better. So, in this version of the story, Nargle is Bill Alexander to Ambrosia’s Bob Ross.

The theme of betrayal is prominent in the film, and despite lashings of comic relief, there is a lingering sadness. When Nargle’s television gig is finally terminated, he is assured that it is not because he is old, but the truth is that someone younger and more telegenic has filled his place. Even his 4,274 paintings of Mt. Mansfield are unwanted. The parochial yet pompous art historian Dr. Bradford Lenihan, director of the local art museum, informs Nargle: “Sadly, we just had the walls painted. And that’s something we are showing off too. The beauty of the museum itself.” His demeaning suggestion is to donate the paintings to Motel 6 or the Red Roof Inn. To add insult to injury, on the way out of the museum Nargle spots a bad painting by Ambrosia. Out with the old, in with the new.

Nargle’s paintings at last become valuable after most of them are destroyed in a studio fire, and the artist himself is presumed dead. Posthumously, he suddenly regains his early popularity and people line up to see his work once more. The museum scrambles to acquire a painting, and the PBS station director has to dumpster dive to retrieve one he had discarded. Now in hiding, Nargle looks for ways to paint while remaining anonymous. Patient viewers who sit through the credits of Paint are rewarded with a clever resolution—Nargle becomes “Blanksy,” swapping his dinky easel landscapes for gigantic, surreptitiously painted barn- wall stencil murals. (This witty denouement has a real-life point of reference: in 2021, the artist known as Banksy created a Bob Ross-narrated process video titled Create Escape, the subject of which was Oscar Wilde escaping from Reading Gaol.)

The synopsis of Paint on the movie’s website judiciously avoids any direct references to Bob Ross. All it says is:

Owen Wilson stars as Carl Nargle, Vermont’s #1 public TV painter who is convinced that he has it all: a signature perm, custom van, and fans hanging on his every stroke… until a younger, better artist steals everything (and everyone) Carl loves.

Nargle sports Ross’s iconic perm and dresses the same. He speaks in a similarly hushed melodic voice, has numerous female fans, and cheats on his girlfriend. In real life, infidelity allegedly caused the collapse of Ross’s first marriage, and during his second, he was known to have paramours along his traveling-painter route. Sexiness was part of his brand, and Bob Ross played up his sex appeal, borrowing the scruffy beard and shaggy hairdo from the male model in the first edition of The Joy of Sex. He admitted that while addressing his TV audience he imagined himself talking to a woman in bed. Even his trademark beating of the “almighty brush” on the easel, which caused the cameraman to wear a raincoat to protect his clothes, was less practical technique than a symbolic display of virility.

By contrast, Carl Nargle has only a patina of sexiness. His sex appeal is simply a product of the adulation directed at him by female admirers, and when they turn away from him to worship Ambrosia, it disappears. Like the perm on his head, it was artificially induced and temporary. And as it turns out, he is not the sexual predator in the movie after all. That role belongs to Ambrosia, who flirts her way through the Vermont PBS station, bedding two of her admirers—Katherine, whom she poaches from Carl, and Wendy, who used to be Carl’s groupie. When the two women meet Ambrosia’s family (who seem to be suspiciously used to such introductions), it turns out that they went to school with her mother and grandmother respectively. Were Ambrosia a man, these spring/fall, spring/winter romances would no doubt have raised eyebrows.

The poor reception Paint received suggests that the 1980s and 2010s (when most of the film appears to take place) are not just a generation but a mindset apart. The behavior of yore was so different that it scrambles a contemporary audience’s ability to make sense of the plot. Instead of evaluating information as intended, viewers interpret the story in terms intelligible to the post #MeToo and post #BLM world: A stale, pale, male painter refuses to make way for a young and gay woman of color who will not confine her subject matter to patriarchal and outdated mountain landscapes. Even though it is Ambrosia who casually seduces women, including her boss, her behavior has largely been ignored by opponents of the film, who seem unable to accept that the film’s “smooth operator” and “sexual predator” could be a woman.

Unless one is able to appreciate the nuances of Paint and its attempt to explore the assumptions, hypocrisies, and inconsistencies of today’s art world, Nargle may seem like an anachronistic caricature. But only until his “afterlife,” when he reemerges as another kind of populist artist. In a final irony, Nargle’s fictional reincarnation upholds the real-life Bob Ross as a Robin Hood figure who fought to reclaim painting for the people, liberating it at last from the temples and the priests of high culture.

Last November I visited Evan Holloway’s Los Angeles studio to tape our conversation for his upcoming exhibition “Scry if you want to” at Xavier Hufkens. It consisted of three new bodies of work: abstract paintings referencing 16th century writings by the inventors of Enochian magic John Dee and Edward Kelley, large-scale automatic drawings, and welded assemblage sculptures. Evan also recorded several songs, which were to be released this summer as an LP. Edited video of our conversation has been available on the gallery website, but now the entire transcript has been published as well. It is included in the LP package together with 1:1 reproduction an automatic drawing from the show, an etched reproduction of John Dee’s “Golden Talisman,” and lyrics printout. It is available for sale on Bandcamp.com. More information in the links below.

When Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel Doctor Zhivago, the Soviet press exploded with outrage. The year was 1958, and although Stalin was dead, he had instilled a lingering fear, and despite the liberalizations of his successor, Khruschev, critical portrayals of life in the ussr were still commonly demonized as enemy propaganda. The leading Russian cultural newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta featured an entire spread headed “Anger and Infuriation” with a selection of searing, over-the-top letters savaging the novel and its author. One of the most fervent accusers was Anatoly Safronov, the erstwhile secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers and a laureate of the Stalin Prize. In a rambling, semi-literate statement, the bureaucrat-writer denounced Pasternak, proudly declaring that although he had not read the offending novel, he roundly condemned it. An adaptation of his words, “I did not read it, but I rebuke it,” became a late-Soviet underground byword for the absurdity of uninformed criticism.

I was reminded of Safronov’s inadvertent bon mot twice last week: first, as I read the Brooklyn Museum’s announcement of their latest exhibition “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” and then again as I perused moma’s “pride-month”-themed Instagram posts.¹ The Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby co-curated the Brooklyn Museum show, billed as “part of a global presentation . . . marking the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death,” together with Sackler Senior Curator Catherine Morris and Senior Curator Lisa Small. In the opening quote of the exhibition description, Gadsby channeled Safronov’s pigheaded message of proud ignorance: “Picasso said, ‘You can have all the perspectives at once!’ What a hero. But tell me, are any of those perspectives a woman’s [sic]? Well, then I’m not interested.” To make up for the lack of a “woman’s” perspective in Picasso’s art, Gadsby et al. proceed to hitch the “woman artist” wagon to Picasso’s power engine. Nevermind that Picasso’s pronouns would have been “he/him,” so that a “woman’s” perspective would not have been his thing in the first place. Logic is just another patriarchal atavism.

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Non-fungible tokens are so passé. The initial furor prompted in March 2021 by Christie’s sale of Beeple’s opus for the princely sum of $69,346,250 has long since subsided. Damien Hirst has had enough time to wrap up his year-long Currency project—an experiment which pitted unique physical paintings against their blockchain inscriptions. Donald J. Trump is a conspicuous latecomer to this party, a fact that he was oddly eager to emphasize when he announced his initial drop of NFT trading cards in December, 2022. Trump admitted that NFTs were no longer a “hot category. … Everyone said ‘what’s he doing it for—that’s so cold.’” Normally, Trump presents himself as a leader not a follower, so what could have led him to jump into this game so late, and even to boast about his tardiness? More perplexing still, why would he issue a second series of NFTs in mid-April of this year, thereby causing the value of the initial collection to promptly collapse?

In the aftermath of the original drop, Trump claimed that his motives were purely aesthetic, a point he reiterated in a Truth Social post on April 19th: “My New Trump Digital Trading Cards Series 2 is the Number One Collection in the World. It must be that people love the art.” From its purported triumph, Trump deduced that this “really incredible artwork” must be “very beautiful and interesting.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but the cards are certainly interesting. The first collection of 45,000 NFTs comprised extravagantly camp and heroic portraits of Trump as a musclebound cowboy, a rockstar, and even an astronaut—quintessentially American images. In sharp contrast, a number of images in Series 2 have a distinctly monarchical flavor.

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A lifetime ago, Gore Vidal published two searing essays about sexual morality in the respective contexts of law and politics. Vidal lobbed his critical grenades from publications whose very existence was a testament to the efficacy of the First Amendment. In 1965, “Sex and the Law” appeared in the Partisan Review, a journal started by the Communist Party USA-affiliated John Reed Club.

The hedonistic Playboy magazine, which printed “Sex is Politics” in 1979, aimed to undo mainstream mores. In these two essays, Vidal argued that sex, including pornography, was the “hottest of buttons” in politics, and that the prudery of “dead-letter laws,” then still on the books, was rooted in outdated religious prejudice. “When the Cromwells fell,” he wrote, “the disgruntled Puritans left England for Holland (not because they were persecuted for their religious beliefs but because they were forbidden to persecute others for theirbeliefs).” Once in North America, the Puritans fulfilled their goal of creating a “quasi-theocratic society,” the morality of which had distinctly Old Testament origins.

We are nearly a quarter of the way into the 21st century, but despite most people’s tolerant self-image, moral censorship of the visual arts remains a problem. Neither the conservative Right nor the progressive Left are ready to embrace Playboy’s proposition that morality is a matter for the individual conscience. Across the political spectrum, accusations of indecency provoked by the alleged overexposure of human flesh can still lead to furious controversy and even suppression of the offending material. In a 1996 Vanity Fair essay about The People vs. Larry Flynt, Christopher Hitchens correctly observed that “the ‘righteous and violent’ American culture war is for real.” But two recent instances of moral uproar (from the Right on one occasion, and from the Left on another) confirm that the opposing sides can at least concur on the topic of risqué art. Both want it hidden from view to avoid traumatizing the audience and wider society.

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