Hairy News and Views: Barack, Michelle Obama Muslim Art

All of the nation is up in arms about a satirical drawing put on the cover of the New Yorker. The drawing depicts Michelle Obama with an afro and carrying a machine gun while she "fist-bumps" her America-hating, Muslim husband, Barack Hussein Obama (I just used satire, did you get it? Hehehehe). Oh yeah, an American flag is burning in the fireplace, too. This drawing and its controvery interests me because I am also making a series of art featuring the Barack Obama phenomenon. I rely on satire with some elements, parody in others, but mostly I just try to create my own language of images and symbols to convey a unique vision to go along with how I see Obama's own political vision, his campaign, and how it is being interpreted by myself and others as it goes along. So this drawing on the New Yorker cover relates to my own efforts to an extent in how it uses irony to poke fun of ignorant people's impressions of Obama or at the direct, malicious smear-jobs spawned by rumor-mongers and hateful, disgusting people who know better and have their own agenda.

Of course the New Yorker has a right to have the drawing on the cover, but people also have the right to protest it. I don't think it is quite in the league of that lynching noose that was put on the cover of Golfweek Magazine. The New Yorker is a literary journal and its readers are generally well-read, sophistated people who "get it", and I'm certain none of this outrage surprises the magazine's editors and publishers in the least. They got what they wanted. On the level of the cover being good "art" or "humor", I think it is actually a pretty cheap, easy effort at causing controversy. There has to have been numerous drawings and cartoons made about Obama at this point that were equally explosive or offensive. It's just that the New Yorker is such a well-known magazine that it has attracted the attention of ill-humored or ignorant people amidst the masses. Barack Obama and McCain have both denounced the cover but that is the boring mainstream for you. "Good Art" and "Mainstream Politics" don't go together too well because such wide-spread media coverage reaches too many people who either don't understand, don't appreciate or care about the function of art in society. They see things at face value and they start chirping like birds.

There is an argument to be made as to whether the New Yorker was irresponsible when it comes to people's potential reactions and what the drawing says about religion and race relations in America and how it will influence people who don't understand the humor. That's a matter of opinion and that's why I think people have the right to complain. I guess in the end I think the cover isn't "good humor" or "good art" but it IS "good controversy" which equals alot of exposure for the magazine. It at least DOES get the mainstream public talking and discussing irony in art, whether they realize it or not, and that can't be bad. As long as we here in America act a bit more civil and sensible than all those Muslims who physically attacked people and places after those satirical cartoons of Muhammed were published in Denmark, we'll be okay.