If you aren't familiar with the work of Sean Hannity's favorite artist, Jon McNaughton, then Stephen Colbert's brilliantly brutal takedown of his painting "One Nation Under Socialism" is all you need to get up to speed (actually, just the painting's title tells you everything you need to know). According to McNaughton, his work even managed to get banned from BYU for being too conservative. Yesterday, McNaughton unveiled his new piece. I present you "Obamanation":
It's hard to know where to start in analyzing this. In my opinion, it is much, much worse than previous efforts in all dimensions--composition, execution, cheezeballness of the hyper-literal representations he calls "symbols," lies--and that is really saying something.
It is nearly impossible to choose, but to point out just a few of the especially misguided elements, let's start with the Golden Gate Bridge in the upper right corner. According to the handy-dandy mouseover text (click the painting to go to McNaughton's site to see it--this is a "feature" of all his paintings), this represents the "You didn't build that" incident. Is the Golden Gate Bridge, one of the greatest public works achievements of all time, really the best example of something individuals in the free market did all by their lonesome?
It's hard to account for the "Beer Summit" getting the most prominent billing of any of the grievances depicted in this painting. (That's what the sad police officer holding a beer in the foreground is supposed to represent.) Maybe it's just a tell that all the more principled-seeming grievances (budget excess, wars, etc) are just appendages to the racism and fear of a black president. Note, too, that the officer is leaning against the oval office desk, which the mouseover tells us "symbolizes" that time that, in Wonkette's words, a black man put his feet on the desk.
Then there's this quote from the mouseover text for the Occupy protesters, which seems to imply that demeaning a police car (read: symbol of masculine authority) is worse than raping a woman: "Occupiers gathered as angry mobs, arrested for disorderly conduct, assault, rape and even defecating in public and on Police vehicles."
Be sure not to miss that half-of-GWB's-face hiding out behind the "Obama's ideas to balance the budget" list. I don't know why he's depicted that way, except to amuse me, which it does. That budget list, by the way, is where McNaughton's failure to have even the "smallest hint of subtlety" (-Colbert) really hits its nadir--he can't even be bothered to come up with trite, couldn't-be-more-literal representations of these grievances, so he puts them in words in the painting.
There's really too much to point out, but I'm sure you'll have fun in the comments pointing out all of it.
Here are links to a few of his other paintings, if you just can't get enough mouseover text:
Epic fun with some of his previous work: