The Ham of God
Banksy didn’t say it first. “To Comfort the Disturbed, and to Disturb the Comfortable” is the title of a poem published by poet, activist, and educator César A. Cruz in 1997. It makes sense, however, that Banksy’s murals do exactly that.
Tyrants hate art. Real art, the kind of art that makes truth illuminate the heart and plunge a knife into the gut. Tyrants like art that glitters and flatters, that deifies, that evokes fear. Dictators want their art to convey a single message: “my omnipotence will not be challenged.”
The Politics of Fascism
Trump is the most unoriginal of despots. He mines hatred to secure his power. Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich provided his playbook. His role models are the entrenched strong men of the globe’s most repressive societies: Vladimir Putin in Russia; Viktor Orbán in Hungary; Kim Jong Un in North Korea; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Türkiye; even Jair Bolsonaro, the former President of Brazil.
He has kneecapped anything resembling an independent press. Forty-Seven has initiated a war on education, from kindergarten through graduate school, imposing a propaganda on them that reeks of Josef Stalin. He is using a power never invested in his office and the threat of endless prosecution to censor contrary voices and to cow intellectuals and creatives into self-censorship. Behind all that bronzer is without a doubt the most apt pupil Roy Cohn, architect of the Red Scare of the 1950s, ever had.
Standing Firm
dictator approved
Those who stood firm for the principles enunciated in the Constitution often paid a price for their courage. They were stripped of their livelihoods. Sometimes they lost their lives. Yet the First Amendment is the foundation on which resistance is upheld.
Just Resist
Paramount canceled The Late Show rather than fire Stephen Colbert. Thank heavens his contract ensures ten more months of utterly unrestrained monologues. Mystery artists received permits for temporary, scathing installations on the most prominent pieces of real estate on the National Mall. Protest art brandished on “No Kings Day” and at other venues is eloquent in outrage.
Sometimes, though, people just say “no.”
Trans Forming Liberty
Trans Forming Liberty
Amy Sherald’s magisterial show, American Sublime, ends at the Whitney Museum of American Art on August 10, 2025. It will not, however, travel to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington DC as planned. One painting in particular, Trans Forming Liberty (2024) is simply too incendiary, given the sensibilities of the current president and his cult members. Sherald, quite rightly, isn’t going to remove a single work chosen for this meticulously curated exhibition.
What is or isn’t biology, what is or isn’t history, what is or isn’t reality—these are no longer questions to be pondered in institutions of learning or through any sort of aesthetic endeavor. The diversity and ineffable joys of humanity are instead to be homogenized into something as pale and socially obedient, as religiously orthodox and politically totalitarian as possible. Difference and disagreement will not be tolerated. All this, we understand will Make America Great Again.
Reinterpreting Images
This is not a new war, only the most recent campaign in a very old conflict. Individual artists—including the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89) and Andres Serrano (b. 1950)—were held up as evidence of some radical Leftist effort to destroy American culture. Various politicians railed against the use of public monies for anything of a cultural nature that had not been vetted and approved by the most conservative tastes in the country.
America is Black
The West as America, Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 in particular roused the ire of individuals like the late Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK). An editorial in The Oklahoman on June 7, 1991 called it a “warped view of the West” and compared it unfavorably to “the high-quality exhibits at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.”
The main problem? Apparently The West as America “picture[d] the westward movement as highly detrimental to Indians and the environment.”
No. Really? Yuh think?
But then MAGAs have decided that our history is set, deep-frozen in the cryogenic spaces of the White Nationalist, religious mythology that passes for facts. For them.