[Guevara]

Painter Jon McNaughton of Provo, Utah is very popular. Glenn Beck praised him on Fox News. Sean Hannity who purchased this painting for an undisclosed sum. He’s expecting $300,000 a pop now, which is what an Andy Warhol print riddled with two gunshots à la Dennis Hopper sold for at Sotheby’s. Is there anything blatantly racist about his paintings? Nah, see, in the crowd around Jesus in his One Nation Under God, there are some black people in the back, like Harriet Tubman and a “Black Union Soldier,” yet, the painter is constantly defending himself against accusations of racism on his blog because unlike the accusers, he doesn’t look at the world “through the prism of race.” He says, “You hear it so much, it’s like wow, whatever. I can’t help the fact President Obama is partly African American,” defending One Nation Under Socialism. “He’s fanning the flames… It’s a very dark painting.”

Like Norman Rockwell, McNaughton stages the scenes for his paintings with real human beings. (The model who played Obama does not want his name to be revealed publically.) To best capture what it would look like to burn the Constitution, McNaughton, who attended Brigham Young University on a full arts scholarship, lit a piece of paper on fire and watched it burn. “I lit it on fire to see what would happen. It went up fast,” he says, recalling the experiment. The art world, though, hasn’t been too kind to McNaughton. Critics in New York and Cambridge, England, have accused him of being “didactic” and “not understanding socialism,” he says. New York Magazine’s art critic called his paintings “typical propaganda art” and “visually dead as a doornail.” McNaughton brushes off the pans. “I don’t expect to get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or be in a museum, at least in my lifetime,” he says. “It’s like having those experts in jazz criticize country music. One type of art trying to tell everyone else what real art is.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/an...or-six-figures
http://animalnewyork.com/2012/04/hot...d-rap-analogy/