A Contest with Very Cool Prizes

A call for artists to respond to the current mishegoss

T.J. Mabrey, Fuck, copperplate print, 7 by 5 inches (2024)

I had another post planned for this week (about a common art scam), but it can wait. Our recent presidential election, which enraged and dismayed so many, got me thinking about how artists react to politics—and in that broad-based category I include war, corrupt governance, economic disasters, racial inequities, and so on. Think of Goya’s “Disasters of War” or his portrait of the overstuffed royal family of Carlos IV

George Grosz’s indictments of the Weimar Republic

Honoré Daumier’s sleazy lawyers

Picasso’s monumental Guernica

Martha Rosler’s feminist critique of the Vietnam War in her “House Beautiful” series

And even Jenny Holzer often seems to have a political subtext

The challenge to you, dear readers, is to send me your interpretation of our current zeitgeist, satirical or straightforward. Some ideas I had: Trump swearing the oath of office on a copy of Mein Kampf instead of the Bible; a group portrait of the Billionaire Boys Club; the Melania Barbie doll with outfits for spa day, an inauguration ball, and date nights with Donald; an illustrated recipe for Haitian pussycat en croûte. Knock yourself out.

And if you’re a Trumper, you can enter too. After all, we’re still a democracy.

Our prizes? Some wonderful books (though I haven’t yet decided what’s first, second, and third). Maybe you’ll get your pick.

Please send your entry as a jpg or other downloadable file to ajlandi33@gmail.com before December 13, 2024, and I will try to publish as many as I can for the holidays. Here are the results from the monuments context we held on Vasari21 four years ago, to give you a bit of inspiration.

Let the games begin!