Posted by
Ed Lilly on Sunday, February 01, 2009 10:37:33 AM
Jonah Goldberg at NRO posted a link to a Detroit Free Press story that apparently ran the day after the inauguration. The premise of the piece is this - take a photo of yourself, and create a split-image by matching half of your face with half of President Obama's face. Goldberg notes that the piece is "borderline grotesque," and that Democrats would most likely agree if the subject were a Republican.
But then it hit me. The most likely scenario for a conservative or Republican politician is that an "artist" would get a grant from the federal government to create a work of art that incorporates split-images like the ones shown in the Detroit Free Press story, with the politician's face paired with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, a chimpanzee (in the case of George W. Bush), and a host of things that are best left to the imagination. And it would be hailed by liberals as daring, subversive and cutting edge.
Now, imagine if an artist, probably without a grant from the federal government, were to create such a display using President Obama's image.
Heck, it would have been interesting of some political cartoonist had done something like this as a counter to the pictures from the Detroit Free Press. It would take a lot of guts, and carefully crafted images, to not go too far toward poor taste so that one's commercial career would not be ruined.