Campbell Brown on Presidential Portraits
I’m always shocked to anything resembling arts coverage in the mainstream news. In the United States, we seem to have collectively decided that the arts are not important, and the above video editorial by CNN’s Campbell Brown shows it. In the above video, Brown disses the taxpayer costs associated with presidential portraits, which range from $7500 to $50000 per portrait for this administration. While I think that a better tribute to many of the Bush administration’s players would be better burned as straw effigies, official portraiture is one of the few areas where the arts and our government actually intersect.
Brown plays the economy card (which is already being used by arts organizations to explain programming cuts, and also by funders as an excuse not to support - it’s the get out of jail free card of 2008), suggesting that a photo would do instead. But what Brown doesn’t know (and why should any major news personality know anything about the art economy, anyways) is just how expensive photo portraits are. You’re not paying for the materials here, you’re paying for the pedigree and talent of the portraitist. Last time I saw a number tossed around a Cathy Opie portrait would go for $30,000, and I can’t imagine how much it would cost to rent Annie Leibowitz or David LaChappele to shoot the Bush cabinet. So what we’re talking about isn’t really “wow, these paintings are such a ripoff. Come on, I just bought this Nagel of a hot chick at the Salvation Army for $5, why is this portrait so damn expensive?” What we’re talking about is whether the government’s resources should be spent on the direct commission of arts in these amounts.
I don’t see arts people telling folks to “fix their own plumbing” just because the economy is bad. No one is saying that Joe the Plumber (who’s a shady, lying shit as far as I’m concerned) should go without work because people can just take a DIY attitude to home plumbing until the current recession ends. No, instead everyone is up in arms that the poor guy might have to pay more taxes if his fictional business made him a pile of money each year.
Why is it that arts workers and their jobs are perceived as disposable and non-essential whenever things get rough, but other professions aren’t? Imagine being a professional portraitist, spending years and tens of thousands of dollars to get that precious, precious MFA, building a business, buying or renting a studio, investing in the tools and materials of your trade, only to be told - we don’t need you anymore, we’ll just replace your skilled, American labour with a snapshot by our in house photographer. What this kind of thinking amounts to is job cuts when people desperately need work to maintain their businesses until the economy gets less harsh. What Brown is really advocating here is an attack on some of America’s hardest working small businesspeople.
When I was a young, yarmulke wearing Hebrew school student, our art teacher was a portraitist who painted one of the official Clinton portraits for the Congress. It was a major commission, that kept her working for most of a year and which certainly made up a great deal of her income. That was her job. I’m sure that the portraitists that I know in LA are hurting in the current economic climate, that they’re afraid that the declining fortunes of their clients will cause a slowdown that will impact their ability to support themselves and their families. Portraitists have every right to employment and income, even during a poor economy.
Even in a failing economy, we have to maintain our cultural traditions and pride. If we’re still buying multi-million dollar jet aircraft equipped with missile shooting lasers of dubious use, then we certainly have the funds in our federal budget to maintain the tiny portion that actually goes to the commissioning and creation of art.
Technorati Tags: Campbell Brown, CNN, art, portraiture, official portraits, painting
