
An In-Depth Critique of D. Trump, the Artist.
I may have tons of uninformed opinions about politics, but I spent $140k to be a well-trained blow hard during an art crit. Let’s begin shall we?
Considering the $9,000 price tag for this piece, the materials choice of a charcoal grey sharpie and a piece of computer paper is an interesting one. At first, second or even third glance one might consider this choice careless, but let’s examine this piece under the umbrella of Folk Art since the creator is untrained and clearly has some sort of mental health issue. Understanding that this piece was made by a man who was at the time in his 60s, we can surmise that he either has the mental capacity and motor skills of a 9-year-old, or is in the beginning stages of alzheimer’s.
The center of the piece and visual anchor is a crude Trump Tower. The artist took some liberties here. TT is vastly enlarged in this drawing making it look like one of the tallest buildings in the New York skyline. The obvious point the artist is trying to make with this size choice here is “I AM THE BEST”, and I don’t think the artists intended message needs further examination than that.
Let’s take a second to go deeper. Look at the other nameless Manhattan buildings surrounding Trump tower, clearly representing phalluses or in layman’s terms “dicks and balls”. Pointy, threatening and plentiful, they crowd the skyline and close in on the center of the piece. However Trump’s building still stands out, particularly in girth. Every building is pretty much the same height, but what is really of interest to me is the ragged edge of Trump Tower. While this enigmatic piece came with no museum label or artists statement, we can only guess at the artists intention. One doesn’t need to be a Freudian scholar to read what Trump is sub-consciously visually conveying here: “I am surrounded by dicks and have a deep-seated fear of castration. Despite all of my posturing, money and the fact that I have dozens of buildings around the world with my fucking name on them, I still feel like I don’t measure up.”
The artistic choice to use a shiny gold Sharpie to sign his name and make it one of the biggest elements on the canvas, sorry… piece of computer paper, back up this theory. Despite the minimalist composition, Trump still felt the need to make his name big AND shiny. While the artists intention was likely to back up his initial message of “I am the best”, next to a castrated building with his name on it, it winds up just reading as “I am insecure”.
Additionally, the choice to frame a piece of artwork that took likely less than 10 minutes to make in gold with an archival standard frame job that cost likely hundreds of dollars is also one that reeks of insecurity. I believe the colloquialism is “polishing a turd”. I will say though, that the calligraphic marks representing perhaps the manhattan river, while seemingly an afterthought, do add some nice motion to the piece.
While at the surface it seems like a poorly constructed, lazy piece of work meant to inflate the artists ego, to the trained eye it speaks volumes about the artists subconscious. Does that make it a great piece of artwork? I will leave it to the audience to decide.
