Eric Trump, subject of photographs

Eric Trump realizes one of the hostages is still alive.

Last night, philanthropist and third-generation millionaire Eric Trump told Sean Hannity that Democrats were “not even people” to him, given the way they obstructed his father’s agenda. His Q factor remained about the same. Even if his father weren’t the most hated man in America, Eric would have a likability problem. I blame photography. For a man who has spent an inordinate amount of his life posing for pictures, Eric has a hard time looking likable on camera. For example, here he is threatening me in church:

When someone is about to take your picture, push your jaw forward and hold your lips as close together as you can without letting them touch. That conveys the most relatable human emotion, seething rage. But don’t forget to show your lighter side, too. Here’s Eric after filling his maid’s room with pigeons:

He got her good. You think this is a weird way for him to smile, but that’s because you haven’t seen the alternative. Here he is meeting you on your first day as his new maid:

I cannot overemphasize how important it is that you never be alone with two out of the three people in this picture. Here’s Eric telling a joke at your grandmother’s funeral:

He came with your cousin, even though they’ve broken up a couple of times in the last year. But what do you want her to do? He’s rich. Here he is after learning that you still have student loan debt.

That’s cool, if you don’t have the money to pay it off. He has the money to pay it off so, personally, if he had student loans, that would be bullshit. But whatever—it takes all kinds, right? Here he is just begging us to Photoshop a dick into his picture:

Even his dad is thinking about it. You don’t think Donald Trump realizes his second son is kind of gooney? The man values appearances above all else. He knows Eric is off-putting, but he loves him. He loves his giant, gummy, probably evil son. Here they are enjoying hot dogs together:

The best part is, they were free. You tell the guy you want two dogs, he passes them down, and when he asks for the money, you tell him you already paid. If he gets his manager or something, insist that he be fired. Who are they going to side with—the hot dog guy or Donald Trump and his son? The trick is to stay close to your dad. It only works if he’s rich.

Kathy Griffin’s head photo is wrong aesthetically, not morally

A photo of Kathy Griffin taken by Tyler Shields for TMZ

The thing about performatively threatening the president is that you want to make it symbolic. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to do that. You can threaten a person who symbolizes the president, as Snoop did when he expressed his frustration with powerful clowns. Or you can make the threat itself symbolic. If I sent you a drawing of me stabbing you in the chest with a knife, you would probably go to the cops. But if I sent you a drawing of one stick figure urinating on another, with the figures labeled “me” and “you” respectively, you would probably take it as less a literal threat than a gesture of contempt. Introducing symbolism lets you perform violence against the president and expect it to be taken as an artistic expression rather than a threat.

That’s where Kathy Griffin messed up. This picture of her holding a severed head is not symbolic enough. With its big stupid hair, the head looks too much like Trump. And campy though it may be from a special-effects perspective, we are clearly looking at a murder scene. The violence is not symbolic, and neither is its target. It’s a photo illustration of Griffin holding up the severed head of the president.

A lot of people have condemned it as a threat. Threatening the president is illegal, even in a joking context, and the AV Club reports that the Secret Service is investigating. I bet their investigation finds that Kathy Griffin ain’t gonna do shit. This photo was obviously a stunt. K-Griff herself said it was all a jape, once it turned out no one thought the picture was cool. I quote Twitter:

2/ OBVIOUSLY, I do not condone ANY violence by my fans or others to anyone, ever! I’m merely mocking the Mocker in Chief.

— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) May 30, 2017

Welp, there goes your plausible deniability re: that could have been anybody’s head. But more importantly, why didn’t anyone think that picture was cool? I submit that the moral condemnations are a dodge, and a reasonable person would not take this photograph as a threat. The problem with it is not moral but aesthetic. All it achieves is to neatly convey the pitfalls of political art.

What does this picture make us think? It tells us that Griffin is very displeased with President Trump. After that comes a howling silence. There is no nuance to any of it, no source of additional meaning. Her face is expressionless, suggesting neither knowingness nor innocence, irony nor sincerity. She makes no comment on her own attitude toward the president. She makes no substantive comment on the man himself, like if the head were smoking a cigarette or wearing Gaddafi glasses or something. Unless you want to argue that her blue blouse symbolizes support for the Democratic Party, the only idea this picture conveys is “Kathy hate Trump” in capital letters. But a piece of paper with that printed on it wouldn’t be audacious enough to go viral.

This audacity introduces the defense that it’s not the photo that matters but the act of releasing it. In the same way the art wasn’t in Warhol’s soup cans so much as in the act of painting them, “Trump Head” is not a photo but a concept piece. Publishing this picture is like putting a shark in a lucite tank or submitting a urinal to the Grand Central Palace exhibition. What happens when Griffin issues a blunt, potentially illegal expression of hatred for the president? You could argue that’s the artistic question examined here, and it’s not a photo but rather a piece of performance art.

Except what happens is utterly safe and predictable, so it fails as performance, too. It’s not as though this picture will cost Griffin her gig in Branson. With the possible exception of Log Cabin Republicans, the overlap between her audience and people who will be offended by this photograph is small. Here lies the natural sin of political art. Where good art asks questions or introduces unfamiliar sensations, political art is tempted to tell people what they already know.

That’s why Bill Maher sucks now. He’s not surprising me to make me laugh; he’s agreeing with me to make me clap. Griffin’s severed head photo does the same thing. It styles itself as defiant, but it’s a bid for applause. It seems dangerous to hold up the head of President Trump, but when you think about it, anyone else’s head would have been riskier. That’s what makes him so insidious.

The worst thing about having this man as president is the brutalization of the poor, sick, and brown. The second-worst thing is the terrible judgment his election laid upon our country’s soul. But way down the list, and perhaps too little remarked, is the problem of how his flat, stupid badness has flattened and stupefied art. So many of us feel so strongly against him that we are apt to mistake any mirror for a picture. The question of how to say something interesting about this man is getting increasingly hard to answer, and yet he is so terribly important.

Friday links! Striking discrepancies edition

A 1939 photo of Harlem containing a man who looks strikingly like Jay-Z

A 1939 photo of Harlem containing a man who looks strikingly like Jay-Z

That is not Jay-Z in old-timey photographer Sid Grossman’s picture of Harlem, sent to me by old-timey pornographer Ben al-Fowlkes. It sure looks like Jay-Z, though. Either I am some kind of hair-toucher who does not notice subtle facial distinctions among people of other races, or that Depression-era Harlemite looks uncannily like Hov.  The already alarmingly low level of can is reduced even further by the familiar idea of Jay-Z dressing up in old-fashioned luxury clothes to evoke a particular period in black history. Appearing in a wool suit and newsboy cap in Harlem is not something he did do, exactly, but it sure is the kind of thing he might do. Today is Friday, and the world is full of striking discrepancies. Most of it fits, and then one detail blows the whole thing into weirdo territory. Won’t you demand an impossible consistency with me?

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