The best just keeps on getting better

Sigh. Many of you will remember Jon McNaughton, whose unfettered artistry I sampled in a recent post. Well, he's at it again:

(Incidentally, one of the cutest parts of McNaughton's site is his right-click blocker, which soberly informs you that the images on his site are copyrighted. I just want to pat him on the head and ruffle his hair!)

Perhaps he realized that playing artist-in-residence to the fringe right generates notoriety and its corresponding profits. I can hear Ayn Rand's post-mortem exultation from all the way over here.

I seriously considered not writing about this painting—there isn't much to say that doesn't also apply to McNaughton's previous offering—yet after the enthusiastic response to my previous post I feel duty-bound to share it. It's all here, just as before: the crushingly heavy-handed political message, the workmanlike copy-and-paste historical portraiture, the inarticulate rebuttal of "liberal" criticism. So as much fun as it would be to tear The Forgotten Man limb from limb, allow me instead to offer summary criticism. It's a better use of everyone's time.

Art transcends the prosaic machinations of day-to-day politics. It may reflect on its times, but when it does so it captures their essence rather than regurgitates their tiresome details. Decades from now we will have largely forgotten the political minutiae responsible for the controversies over which we so bitterly disagree, their particulars no more noteworthy than the 1791 whiskey tax or the merits of bimetallism. Yet McNaughton glorifies the petty conflicts, disgorging one-sided talking points as though they were timeless truths plucked from the tree of knowledge. He panders to the immediate present, and the result has a correspondingly short shelf life. He wants us to accept it as art, but it isn't; it's a political cartoon whose medium happens to be oil on canvas.