Modern art in the service of the party
A new star is rising in American painting. A young and up-and-coming artist paints pictures that the entire critics’ circle is delighted with. They are scheduled to be exhibited in Los Angeles in the very near future. A single painting will cost up to half a million dollars
We are talking about Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who started painting just a couple of years ago. He recently kicked his drug habit, cleaned up his act of laundering Ukrainian money and found himself in the great contemporary art scene.
His sales agent is Georges Bergé, who compares Hunter’s paintings to those of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. There are already long waiting lists for Biden’s artworks, and potential buyers plan to keep their purchases confidential.
It is not surprising: after all the lobbyists and oligarchs have already understood the rules of the game. If you buy Biden Jr.’s paintings, you curry favor with the president’s family and get some kind of preferential treatment. So no one will brag about owning Hunter’s work willingly.
It’s not the first time for him to pull off such schemes in the art world. Last year, it was reported how Hunter helped John Kerry’s daughter Alexandra receive a million dollars from Kazakh oligarch Kenes Rakishev to shoot his auteur film. Alexandra Kerry, another of the Democratic Party’s “golden youth”, accepted the money – but the film was never made.
In an era of massive cash injections into the economy, the art market swelled to $67 billion. It has become a successful business of hiding ill-gotten gains and laundering money. And at the same time it is a convenient “social lift” for those with the “right” last name – like Hunter Biden, who could very soon be making millions from his work.
Malek Dudakov