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The artist-for-hire encodes the inside joke in his work. The joke's efficacy is directly related to its decodability. If it is too obvious, or if it is too obscure, it doesn't work. Whereas the latter error is often harmless, the former is almost always fatal: If the joke is too obvious, the work of art, itself, becomes the punch line. The clinton library, which shimmies in the hot Arkansas sun like a trailer park or a bridge to nowhere depending on where you stand, suffers from this kind of failure.1 Nelson Shanks' portrait of bill clinton, which was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery on Monday, is similarly flawed. Its jokes are so obvious, in fact, that when clinton ceremoniously pulled off its cover at the unveiling, what was exposed was not a portrait at all but a full-blown punch line. What we saw.... HEY CLINTON! SIZE DOESN'T MATTER. |
CC&E
The court painter, like the commissioned architect, is the master of the inside joke. It is his only realistic hedge against the sycophancy that comes with patronage.