It's the journali$m that is the bad art these days:
"George W. Bush displays portraits of world leaders" by Peter Baker | New York Times April 05, 2014
A dour Vladimir Putin glares ever so frostily, full of menace, free of mirth, ready to annex any passer-by unwise enough to get too close.
The Globe doesn't give you the printed photo I see, but I'm not getting any of those things from it, in fact, he is almost smiling.
I don't think I want to take the NYT tour, folks.
Tony Blair stares ahead, sober and resolute.
Yeah, the war criminal Tony Bliar is a hero.
Hamid Karzai, in traditional green cap and cape, glances off to the side, almost as if checking over his shoulder for the Taliban — or perhaps for the United States. The Dalai Lama looks serene, Stephen Harper jovial, Jiang Zemin grim.
The world’s most distinctive gallery of world leaders opens in Dallas on Saturday, seen through the eyes of the former president of the United States and amateur painter, George W. Bush. Graduating from dogs and cats and landscapes, Bush has produced more than two dozen portraits of foreign figures he encountered while in office and put them on display at his presidential library.
The official debut of the artist known as W. peels back the curtain on a hobby that has consumed him, and intrigued many others, during the last couple of years. Although some of his early works, including vaguely unsettling self-portraits in the bath and shower, were posted on the Internet after his family’s e-mail accounts were hacked, this is the first time the former president has staged an exhibit of his art. And his choices are as revealing about the artist as the subjects.
Related: Portrait of a Former President
Honestly, I'm not into what's going on in that sick, mass-murderer's mind and who would want to hack into that?
“I spent a lot of time on personal diplomacy and I befriended leaders,” Bush said in a seven-minute video produced by the History Channel that will greet visitors to the library on the campus of Southern Methodist University. “I learned about their families and their likes and dislikes, to the point where I felt comfortable painting them.”
For Bush, foreign affairs during his eight years in office revolved around these relationships. “I watched one of the best at personal diplomacy in my dad,” he said.“He was amazing about befriending people where there may not be common interests.
Alongside many of the portraits in the exhibit, “The Art of Leadership: A President’s Personal Diplomacy,” are photographs of the subjects with Bush as well as some artifacts of their interactions. The former president is quoted describing his experiences and giving his impressions of the subject, and the subject is quoted describing Bush.
“What’s interesting about them is less that they’re representational pictures of these people, because a photograph would do just fine,” said Stephen J. Hadley, who was Bush’s national security adviser and who planned to interview his former boss about his paintings Friday. “But in the way he’s painted them, it tells you about his relationships with them.”
Bush picked up painting two years ago after the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis suggested he read Winston Churchill’s essay, “Painting as a Pastime.” After Bush experimented for a while with an iPad sketch application, Laura Bush’s friend, Pamela Nelson, a Dallas artist, recommended an instructor and he began lessons with Gail Norfleet, a noted Dallas painter.
He crafted a portrait of Jay Leno that he presented to him on “The Tonight Show.”
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And the flip side:
"Comfortable making people uncomfortable" by Don Aucoin | Globe staff April 05, 2014
SOMERVILLE — From the time she refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance as a seventh-grader in Newton because she was opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, resulting in a trip to the principal’s office, Madeline Burrows has not been shy about embracing controversy.
Now 22, Burrows is making waves on a larger scale, as the author and star of “Mom Baby God,” a provocative new solo play about the antiabortion movement that is drawn from what she calls “undercover research’’ behind the scenes at conferences, rallies, and marches held by antiabortion organizations.
“I didn’t set out to create a piece of theater that would be comfortable for my audience,’’ Burrows said in an interview near Davis Square Theatre, where “Mom Baby God’’ opens Saturday night. “I wanted to create something that would give people a sense of urgency.’’
Her ideological foes are striking back. Last fall, a member of an organization featured in the play, Students for Life of America, secretly filmed a performance of “Mom Baby God’’ in New York. In an interview this week with the Globe, that group’s president, Kristan Hawkins, accused Burrows of “trying to paint prolifers with a certain crazy brush, that we’re all insane and we want to hamper people and want women to go back to the 1950s. It’s the same old mantra we hear over and over again.”
Additional criticism was leveled Friday by Lila Rose, a prominent antiabortion activist whom Burrows has made a character in her play. “It’s clear that she’s mocking us,” Rose told the Globe. “And I find that really sad.”
The stir seems to suit Burrows just fine. A supporter of abortion rights, she says she wrote “Mom Baby God” to give a fuller picture of the message, methods, fervor, and strategy of the antiabortion movement. She considers her play a call to reenergize abortion rights supporters, who she sees as steadily losing ground in the past few years to more aggressive and tactically shrewd antiabortion forces. “The point is to give people a sense of what’s happening with the right wing in order to get them riled up and fight back against it,’’ Burrows said.
In other words, I'm being presented more divisive slop by my propaganda pre$$.
To strengthen her own sense of what was happening on the other side of the ideological spectrum, Burrows spent six months in late 2012 and early 2013 attending antiabortion conferences and rallies, tape-recording interviews with participants, and taking notes during speeches. One event she attended was the national conference of Students for Life of America.
At the time, Burrows was in her senior year at Hampshire College in Amherst, from which she graduated last year. Written as part of her senior thesis, “Mom Baby God” blends elements of political theater (emphatically taking sides on an issue), and documentary theater (employing quasi-journalistic techniques to gather material).
Then she won't be covered under the censorship law.
So whose handouts did she take?
I've already seen more than enough of this play.
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So she aborted the antiwar stuff, huh?
