Kehinde Wiley has made history as one of the two first African Americans to paint an official presidential portrait. His painting of former President Barack Obama and Amy Sherald's painting of Michelle Obama will be held in the national portrait gallery. Many Twitter users have lambasted both as being "embarrassingly bad." Art is subjective though, and modern art has for years often been pretty bad. This isn't even the main issue here, though.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Social media users react to unveiling of official Obama portrait: "Come back" <a href="https://t.co/ox5fjEDwRS">https://t.co/ox5fjEDwRS</a> <a href="https://t.co/q1l36p074q">pic.twitter.com/q1l36p074q</a></p>— The Hill (@thehill) <a href="https://twitter.com/thehill/status/963270519402491904?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 13, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Others point out that before the Barack Obama portrait, Kehinde Wiley was famed for his paintings featuring African American women beheading white women. Sure it was a "Biblical theme" in one case (based on the story of Judith beheading Assyrian general Holofernes) but the artist himself <a href="http://nymag.com/arts/art/rules/kehinde-wiley-2012-4/">admitted to New York magazine</a> it was also "a play on the whole kill whitey thing."
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The Obama portrait is part of a series. <a href="https://t.co/ddQZUS56np">pic.twitter.com/ddQZUS56np</a></p>— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) <a href="https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/963257464224333824?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 13, 2018</a></blockquote>
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More ironic than the artist's seemingly racially divisive iconography, perhaps, is the fact that much of the work may have, indeed, been completed by Asian interns from his Beijing studio.
<blockquote>“I’m sensitive to it,” he says. When I first arrived at his Beijing studio, the assistants had left, and he made me delete the iPhone snapshots I’d taken of the empty space. It’s not that he wants people to believe every brushstroke is his, he says. That they aren’t is public knowledge. It’s just a question of boundaries. “I don’t want you to know every aspect of where my hand starts and ends, or how many layers go underneath the skin, or how I got that glow to happen,” he says. “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!”</blockquote>
At least McDonald's makes their own secret sauce.
Source:
https://www.thewrap.com/obama-portrait-artist-kehinde-wiley-black-women-decapitating-white-women/
The artist painting should be labeled
HATE SPEECH and BANNED.
Or is HATE SPEECH only when a Whites say or do something that Liberals disagree with?
And of course this is the same president who went to Rev. Jeremiah whatsisname's church ("God Damn, America" being their rallying cry). Yeah, it's no wonder racial divisiveness has amped up in the past decade or so.