What makes the wickedness of TOTALITARIANISM beyond a LESSER strike???
I’ll tell you what…TOTALITARIANISM…is that what you want here? Is art no longer FREE?
The only thing Harti did wrong is forget to put strings on his art
Amazing sculpt, well done! I particularly like how the hair blends in with the piece and doesn’t look out of place. How did you do all the texturing? It looks like the kind of thing that would either be a mountain of work or incredibly easy using some super secret voodoo.
Bravo! It is a rare artist that can truly capture the inner beauty or ugliness of a human soul, and you Sir have nailed what lurks beneath the skin of your subject.
It’s true!! In HS I learned abo propaganda, and how illustrators of the 1800’s all the way up until now have always done this. There are so many. Even really horrible dictators like Hitler, Mussolini. It’s literately been a thing for a long time. Even not presidents, but big political people who are well known!! Memes are a new age of this as well. Even though they may be pictures with captions, memes are basically the same thing we’re mentioning here. agree with you post, no matter what side your on!!!
Excellent work! Now how about portraying some of those few who move his and the rest politicians’ strings, globally? Your work then would be completely on point, portraying the souls of the real monsters on this planet…
Super worked on the body, the pose, the facial expression, perhaps he should have removed a little hair to accentuate the decrepitude and senility of his nature, butit is a mere observation that is unimportant given his level of work
And there’s the rub. That’s your personal opinion, and you’re judging a piece of art primarily based on that. It’s just as superficial a judgment as that of other people here who gleefully praise the piece solely because it agrees with their personal opinion of the subject matter. Neither are good art critiques (though you’re of course entirely free to decide what to hang on your walls depending on nothing more than your personal opinion).
Yes, it does that. Do you deny that humans have the capacity to do monstrous things, and that all too frequently they act on that? Our history is littered with way too many examples to count. Are you not aware how much art that presents political and social commentary speaks in metaphors depicting that monstrosity?
Why should a living subject be exempt from such depictions? If anything, at least they can defend themselves, something the dead don’t have going for them.
Politics is a dirty business, and whatever can shine a light into the dark corners, is good for humanity as a whole. At the very least it’ll start a discussion.
How do you know whether it is “not honest”? And honest in which regard? I don’t know @Harti’s true feelings about his subjects. It might be a mistake to ascribe to the creator any particularly beliefs about the subjects they depict. Is it evocative of what some people perceive when they look at this person? Undoubtedly. Unless you live in a bubble, you must have come across those opinions; they are loud enough that nobody could miss them. There are some in this very thread.
Is it honest, as in, does it depict “the truth” about this person? I don’t know because I don’t know “the truth”. And neither do you. We can only feel our way around it, as depicted in the parable of the blind men and the elephant. The lesson of that parable is that humans tend to claim truth based on limited, subjective experiences while often disdaining other people’s experiences – which are also limited and subjective, and may be equally true or equally false. None of us have a monopoly on “the truth”. If we’re lucky, we can gather some hard evidence that adds up enough to show some essential truths. But we don’t always, and we rarely perceive the whole elephant. Especially not when we only see public performances, from a distance, with no personal connection.
You’ve not looked closely enough if you think there is no legit critique here – not looked closely enough at the art or at the subject matter. At the very least, the Uncle Sam finger is emblematically true of every modern American president. Think about when the US has last not been in a war and chewed up its own young people and many more foreigners in the service of questionable goals. Not in your lifetime. Not in mine. Nor in that of the oldest people alive. That finger is making a legitimate point.
Art is one of the bulwarks against us being chewed up. Artists must therefore be free to tell the truth as they see it. Any political or religious ideology that tries to sanitize or outright suppress art should be instantly suspect, no matter what the reasons. Yes, not all artists engaging in social commentary see all the truths, and some lie outright. We are horribly susceptible to facile lies, and we each should guard ourselves against it. To live an ethical life, it’s up to each of us to sort the truth from the lies. I feel controlled more than enough already by the relentless propaganda of people at the top who have way too much power. I don’t want to live in an environment that controls art by whether it adheres to some nebulous set of “good manners”. And for the sake of what? So our leaders (and our gods, for that matter) don’t get their feelings hurt? They live lives of privilege, and a piece of art is hardly going to shake them off their exalted pedestals. If it pierces the arrogance for a moment, so much the better.
I’m all for general respectfulness between individuals even if they disagree; it moderates our interactions so we’re not constantly at each other’s throats, and it’s the right thing to do considering that parable about the elephant; it helps develop better understanding. But something needs to be able to cut through the protective veneer, something needs to be free to say the most unpalatable and impolite things to those in power. And for me that is art.
