Art and Less Art

And you thought the United States had a monopoly on hateful, amoral, misanthropic artists. Robert Mapplethorpe comes to mind, but he's just one of many whom the critics love. It seems, however, that the once-Catholic nation of Brazil has produced an artist by the name of Gil Vicente who is at the  center of a minor artistic firestorm in Sao Paulo. The College of Lawyers of Brazil are demanding that Vicente's artwork be banned from a 2010 Sao Paulo biennial celebration, a demand strongly resisted by the celebration's organizers.

Vicente, you see, has created a series of nine large charcoal drawings entitled "Enemies." These works of art are apparently self-portraits that depict the artist in the act of assassinating various world leaders including Pope Benedict XVI, George Bush, Brazil's president Lula da Silva, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and others. According to Vicente, these world leaders "kill so many people, killing them would be doing a favor, you see? Why don’t the elite and people in power die?” A pleasant fellow, Mr. Vicente. He is shown below posing in front of several of his assassination drawings.

Vicente posing in front of several of his "Enemies" drawings

As you can see by the above photo, Vicente's artwork, which he certainly intended to be disturbing, is also of only mediocre quality. But in today's art world talent and quality are always trumped by political correctness and leftist politics. I'm pretty sure that Michelangelo, da Vinci, Monet,or any truly talented artist would be ignored by today's politicized art world. And so, instead of the work of the descendants of yesterday's great masters, we get poorly drawn charcoals of an artist killing famous people he dislikes.

Oh, by the way, Vicente is selling the entire set of nine drawings for a mere $250,000. You'll need a lot of wall space though. You can read more about his work here.