“What’s a guy gotta do to buy a little influence anyway?” is what a stereotypical New Jerseyite with a large family might say — National Review‘s own New Jerseyites excepted. But those words may also have been uttered by the purchasers of Hunter Biden’s paintings, with some initially listed for $500,000. What better way to sell influence than through the subjective and inflated market of the canvas?
As the New York Times reported in 2021:
[The Georges Bergés Gallery] is planning to sell 15 works by Hunter Biden, and is asking as much as $500,000 apiece. The prices — which are high for a novice artist — have raised questions in Washington about whether the works might attract buyers seeking to curry favor with the Biden White House.
In response, the administration has helped to develop a set of ethics guidelines that call on the gallery to keep the identity of buyers and other details of the sales from both the artist and the administration.
The White House’s arrangement keeps the details from “both the artist and the administration,” as well as the public. And we’ll have to trust that serial criminal Hunter and the gallery owner, a friend and fellow reprobate, will never talk about who the buyers are.
But whatever the case, we know that Hunter sold paintings for over $200,000 and that the real-world rate could soon be revealed, with some of Hunter’s work now going to the mother of the child he and President Biden refuse to acknowledge.
The Times reports:
According to court documents, Mr. Biden, 53, agreed to pay a monthly sum, which was not disclosed, to Ms. Roberts, as well as turn over several of his paintings, the net proceeds of which would go to his daughter. Mr. Biden, who is in recovery from a crack cocaine addiction, started a second career as a painter whose works have been listed for $500,000 each.
But it’s easy to score points on what looks like obvious skullduggery, so I defer to what National Review‘s knowledgable art critic Brian T. Allen had to say in 2021:
Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s venerable art critic, calls [Hunter’s] work “generic post-zombie Minimalist illustration.” Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. I see lots of new art in New York galleries. Most of it isn’t good. I’d say 99 percent of new art loses its spark after a few years, and its value. This isn’t a tale of our times alone. It has ever been thus.
Oof. It will be fascinating to learn what Ms. Roberts can sell Hunter’s pieces for now that they’re no longer attached to the first fortunate son and his daddy’s good name.
Addendum: The Democrats will naturally ignore this sordid episode — unless Harlan Crow were to buy the paintings and use them as white elephant gifts at his annual Supreme Court Christmas party.