Hunter Biden’s Art: Con or Creative Coup?

W hen Donald Trump was in office, his aides had to field innumerable questions about why Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, exercised so much daily power as an adviser. Ditto for his daughter Ivanka. Trump’s steering of government resources to his properties was a constant headache.

But even Trump toadies never had to deal with the nightmare of an ethically challenged presidential son under formal investigation by the Justice Department, a son who has suddenly become an “artist” without any formal training and who has put his paintings and collages on the commercial market, at prices ranging from $75,000 to $500,000 for a single piece.

To Team Biden’s credit, Hunter’s sudden plunge into art did raise eyebrows inside the White House. The Week’s Joel Mathis pointed out the obvious danger there could be in “potential purchasers who might actually be more interested in buying favor with President Biden than in embracing the creative visions of his son.”

So the White House has hatched an elaborate Rube Goldberg scheme by which the identities of buyers and bidders will be hidden from Hunter Biden — and the rest of the world. A New York gallery owner, Georges Bergès, will play Biden ethics czar and “reject any offer that he deems suspicious or that comes in over the asking price,” the Washington Post’s Matt Viser says,

This preposterous arrangement relies on (1) a belief that the details of the Biden sales won’t leak and (2) effectively outsourcing ethics concerns and judgment calls to a gallery owner who will be making a profit on each Hunter Biden sale.

Even liberal ethics watchdogs are blowing the whistle on Art Biden. Walter Shaub, the head of the Office of Government Ethics under President Obama, tweeted on Friday: “This royally sucks. I’m disgusted. A lot of us worked hard to tee him up to restore ethics to government and believed the promises. This is a real ‘f*** you’ to us — and government ethics.” The art world is “an industry that’s notorious for money-laundering,” Shaub told CNN. “There’s no standards in that industry.”

Indeed, and fewer than ever today. A few years ago, the late Morley Safer of 60 Minutes did a report on how billionaires have warped the art scene. Safer quoted art-gallery owner Larry Gagosian as saying, “I think the wealth in Russia, the Middle East, Asia has changed the [art] market . . . dramatically.” Tim Blum, another gallery owner, told Safer: “It’s the Wild West. This is not a normal retail business. It’s an unregulated, utterly bizarre place to conduct business.”

And this is the world that Hunter Biden, whose background is replete with so far largely unexplained consulting gigs with mysterious Ukrainian and Chinese businesses, has decided to suddenly plunge into?

I have nothing against Hunter Biden starting a new career at age 51. After all, his globetrotting days on behalf of foreign entities appear over.

But the art business is a tough world. Jerry Saltz, an art critic who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, says that 85 percent of the new product is rubbish. Perhaps Hunter’s work will beat those odds, although the reviews so far are at best, well, mixed. Saltz calls Hunter’s oeuvre “generic post zombie formalism illustration.”

Jeffry Cudlin, professor of art curatorial studies and practice at the Maryland Institute College of Art, told the Washington Examiner that Biden’s efforts were “fine decorative amateur work,” adding, “Hey, everybody needs a hobby!”

The Biden administration has gone out of its way to contrast its behavior with that of the previous administration. Deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates went over the top last week in claiming, “The president has established the highest ethical standards of any administration in American history, and his family’s commitment to rigorous processes like this is a prime example.”

When it comes to Hunter’s “Art Biden” project, if you believe the White House, I have a “post zombie” painting of my own to sell you.