Words: Harry Shukman
Those who can’t do, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach gym. But what of those who can’t even do that? The answer may lie in lower Manhattan at a small art gallery where Hunter Biden is exhibiting his abstract works.
On a stretch of West Broadway, where boutique art shops staffed by prescription pill addicts flog pointless culture tokens to investment bankers, there is a gallery displaying a selection of paintings by the president’s son. Fifteen of Biden’s mixed media works, all created in 2020, are up for sale at the Georges Bergès gallery. Prices for these graphic prints begin at $75,000 and go as high as $500,000. How these figures were settled upon must have been a work of medieval alchemy, a secret process known only to the initiated.
That’s because Biden, 51, is not an artist by profession. He made his career in lobbying, investing, and later on, curiously joining the board of a Ukrainian energy company for the lucrative salary of $50,000 a month. Biden also has a sad history of addiction – he has been in and out of rehab for crack and alcohol use – and he says he has found painting helpful in his battle for sobriety. “It’s kept me grounded, and initially kept me away from that underworld just down the canyon from us,” he wrote in his autobiography, Beautiful Things. “Whether anybody likes it or not isn’t what drives me to get up to paint. I paint no matter what. I paint because I want to. I paint because I have to. Our house is filled with paintings.”
Biden in his lobbying days
Biden will need all the enthusiasm that he can muster for his new craft, because every tabloid newspaper and gossip mag is lining up to give his work a good kicking. “Meager turnout marks second day of Hunter Biden’s NYC art show,” the New York Post hooted. Only three potential buyers turned up at the gallery on one dreary Sunday. “You’re not going to see much of a crowd today,” Bergès, the gallery owner, has been quoted saying. When asked if there would ever be a formal opening, he said: “I don’t know.”
The gallery’s blurb promises “powerful and impactful paintings… a unique experience that has become his signature”. The reaction has been mixed. The Post spoke to two lucky viewers – one who said he was “shocked” to find that the paintings were actually good, another who with all the lapidary directness of a true New Yorker pointed down the road and said: “There’s a booth over there that has better work than this shit.”
Any hype that the gallery might have tried to whip up has been kiboshed by the team of lawyers enlisted to vet anyone who wants to get inside. Even the location of a pop-up event in Los Angeles to promote Biden’s new career was kept secret until the last minute. An intimate event for 200 guests was held at Milk Studios in Hollywood, featuring Moby, LA’s Mayor Eric Garcetti, and Sugar Ray Leonard, the world champion boxer.
Critics are also keen to give Biden’s work a pasting. Tabish Khan, a London art critic, sniffed in the pages of Politico that there is “nothing new or challenging about his work”. When asked about the cost of Biden’s paintings, Khan added: “I don’t think I’ll ever spend that much money on a work of art nor be in a position where I have that amount of cash in hand. And if I did, I wouldn’t spend it on a work by Hunter Biden.” Miaow!
Listen to Sebastian Smee, the art critic for the Washington Post. The way he describes Biden’s work makes it sound like he has plumbed new depths of mediocrity. “Most great artists, whatever style of art they make, have been trying to make art all their lives,” he said. “They are fully devoted to what they do. To me, Biden seems a bit of a dabbler.”
And get a load of Edward Dolman, the chief executive of Phillips, the auction house. “There is some value in celebrity,” he said, “but at the end of the day, the quality of the art tends to dictate how the market relates to it.” Not to defend Biden’s art – I think his paintings look like the A-Level Photoshop collages of someone whose Spotify account recently began autoplaying Pink Floyd – but Dolman is obviously wrong.
Beeple, the internet creator, sold an NFT at Christie’s this year for $69 million, making him one of the most expensive living artists to date. Is Beeple, whose works include “Dick Milking Factory”, a cartoon depicting great big phalluses strapped into alien machines, really a better artist than Tracey Emin or Grayson Perry? Their most celebrated works have only sold for a fraction of Beeple’s stoner tat. The cultural gatekeepers sneering at Biden sound jealous that an interloper is cutting in on their action, exposing their industry for peddling get-rich-quick junk.
Other critics have raised a more justifiable stink about ethics. If a business tycoon wanted to buy some influence in Joe Biden’s administration, could they simply drop half a million dollars on one of Hunter’s paintings? “You’re paying for the brush with fame,” John Ploff, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has said. “That’s like a campaign contribution, right?”
The White House claims that it has developed a set of ethical guidelines, and called on the Georges Bergès gallery to keep the identity of any buyers secret from Hunter and the feds. How is that going so far? Hunter Biden was seen posing with fans at the LA event. And Bergès himself recently posed on Instagram for a picture of himself in a Camp David hat, raising speculation that he may have been invited to the presidential getaway. Those guidelines sound foolproof.
Biden has been open about the therapeutic value he found in his paintings. He writes in his autobiography how not so long ago, he would only sleep a few hours a week because he would be so wired on crack. “I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig,” he wrote. “In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself.”
Turning to art, he says, helped him stay on the wagon. Biden’s paintings – mediocre though they may be – have a much more interesting back story than the legions of cynical hacks who tape bananas to the walls of Art Basel and sell them for $120,000. Just don’t ask me to buy any of it.
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