The art of the presidency
What are the major artworks of the Trump years?
Dramatically underlit by the eldritch orb light, the clustered leaders looked like occultists in an H.P. Lovecraft story, summoning primordial terrors from beyond the stars...
In a still from the UN climate summit of September 2019 that may one day be called ‘The Judgment of the Old World on the New’, Trump strides to another meeting, unaware that he’s being watched by St Greta Thunberg.
She is hatefully eyeballing him in a fuchsia sweater, her arms folded, her hair coiled into a puritan ponytail as tight as her expression. Trump is bronzed, Greta is pale as leprosy. She has the spoon eyes of a hobgoblin that has scampered out of a Bosch painting.
He looks jetlagged.
The standard symbolic take was... the eternal conflict ... Trump standing for plenty — the gold furnishings and walk-in freezers that the global billions aspire to — and Greta standing for pain, a future of bug-eating and zealous recycling in a utopia run by scolds. The still was a portal into the political conflicts that will roil the globe for decades.
