A Warhol Christmas at the White House

When it comes to art, the right-wing anti-Obama crowd hasn't had a very good year. Repeated efforts to gin up outrage in a manufactured culture war have either fallen flat or proved downright embarrassing. (You can see some of them here, here and here.)

The latest fiasco is the Great Christmas Ornament Scandal.

On Tuesday, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government blog got its knickers in a twist over one of the Obama White House's myriad Christmas trees. (Big Government is a sibling to Breitbart's Big Hollywood blog, which cranked up a paranoid fantasy about the National Endowment for the Arts a few months back.) The blaring "EXCLUSIVE" led with a blurry photo of a decoupage Christmas ornament adorned with the face of Chinese Communist dictator, Mao Zedong.

"Of course, Mao has his place in the White House," Big Government wailed about the GCOS, taking the Obama-as-socialist meme out for a yuletide spin.

Except, it wasn't exactly Mao. It was Andy Warhol's "Mao."

The image is one of a very large series of silkscreen paintings and prints the late Pop artist made of Mao. Warhol's parody transformed the leader of the world's most populous nation into a vapid superstar -- the most famous of the famous. The portrait photo from Mao's Little Red Book is tarted up with lipstick, eye-shadow and other Marilyn Monroe-style flourishes.

Where did the Christmas decoration come from?

"We took about 800 ornaments left over from previous administrations," First Lady Michelle Obama explained in an earlier press release about getting the White House ready for the holidays, "we sent them to 60 local community groups throughout the country, and asked them to decorate them to pay tribute to a favorite local landmark and then send them back to us for display here at the White House."

The precise source of the Warhol ornament is not known. But Warhol's Maos are in art museum collections from coast to coast, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago (whose painting most resembles the ornament image) and both the County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum has several.

Oh, and at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, the National Gallery of Art has 21 different versions of Warhol's "Mao." Twenty-one. Wait until Big Government bloggers find out about the Communist takeover of the National Gallery.

In a political era when the lunatic fringe has relentlessly caricatured the president of the United States as a pinko, an ornament-maker somewhere in America apparently thought a satirical painting of a socialist was an ideal "favorite local landmark." I can't say as I blame him or her.

But still another layer of unwitting comedy percolates beneath the Great Christmas Ornament Scandal, which was immediately picked up by a host of hyperventilating right-wing Internet sites and blogs and then dutifully flogged into total incoherence by fair-and-balanced Fox News.

Warhol began the series in 1972 in the wake of an epochal visit to Beijing by conservative hero Richard M. Nixon. (The Watergate burglary was four months off.) President Nixon had squeaked into office on the electoral success of the Southern Strategy -- Republican efforts to use race as a wedge issue to appeal to white Southern voters. Finding a Nixon-era Mao in a White House now occupied by our first African American president seems to have shoved some folks over the edge.

Who is the intrepid reporter responsible for the GCOS pseudo-scoop? The post is signed by "Capitol Confidential," a tabloid moniker Warhol himself would have adored. Capitol Confidential is identified as "anonymous sources in the halls of power at the federal, state, and local levels. Big Government double-checks their stories and provides them the cloak they need to reveal the truth."

No, that's not a parody. That's investigative reporting in the age of Drudge. Next thing you know Capitol Confidential will breathlessly uncover the exclusive! shocking! truth! that the Obamas' Christmas tree is also decorated with acorns.

Happy holidays.

-- Christopher Knight

Photos: Andy Warhol, "Mao," 1973; Credit: Ken Hively/Los Angeles Times; Richard Nixon meets Mao Zedong, 1972. Credit: Associated Press

Related:

Glenn Beck's art criticism explained

Glenn Beck's 9/12 logo based on Communist and socialist designs

More art fabrications from the right wing

Comments

[mlm]

Acorns in the White House. LOL. Please don't give the lunatics any more ideas for hysterics!!! This will go out as a fact printed by the LATimes.

[Andrew Breitbart]

If Bush had one kitschy Hitler ornament among 1000s of others, I'm sure you'd refrain from judgment, right? For Big Government, context is everything: When Obama's former Green Energy Czar is an admitted Commie, and former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn claimed Mao as one of her idols and assorted hard-left freaks like Rev. Jeremiah "Goddamned America" Wright and commie-symp terrorist Bill Ayers populate President Obama's public and private life, it's hardly worth dismissing and not reporting the Mao ornament. How the artist of the Mao picture negates the inappropriateness of honoring the world's worst mass murderer in the history of the world in the White House is beyond my pedestrian education . And 'Capitol Confidential' also pointed out the transvestite ornament featuring Hedda Lettuce and the Obama juxtaposed next to Lincoln on Mt. Rushmore. They are real ornaments on a tree in the White House at Christmas time. We let our readers draw their own conclusions about their appropriateness. You, being on the dying vine of the completely untrusted mainstream media, are playing a bad form of prevent defense in your desire to control all media narratives in the Internet age. What, you don't like all this freedom? I sure do. Where will you go to spin your ideological yarns when the LA TIMES goes belly up for its sins of journalistic ommission? And if you want to whine about McCarthyism, you go right ahead. Your publication has aided and abetted a generation of conservatives, Republicans not being able to espouse their politics in their work and public voice because of the Stalinist PC nature of the ruling leftist class in this one-Industry, one-Party town. The lesson learned is we can't trust you lefties with democracy and a free press. Your totalitarian tendencies are too strong and you can't help yourselves.

[Robert Smith]

Mr. Breitbart - your post would seem logical if it weren't so blantantly hypocritical. Indeed, it is the Left's lack of fear (which you on the Right hold so dear to your heart) of information which results in the following train of thought "a transvestite on the White House Christmas tree? No big deal". You and your kind somehow think that to subject a mind to this might result in the tranvestistication (good word, no?) of the country. My, that is a scary thought. We, on the Left, welcome any discussion you and your kind might want to put forth, for it's only when you really tell us what you're thinking, that everyone can see what you have to offer...fear.

I'd wish you a Merry Christmas, but I think you'd feel more comfortable with Have Scary Christmas.

[PASC]

I LOVE IT! Thanks for the laughs.

[umbriadan]

The post below by Andrew Breitbart exactly proves the basis of your commentary. Paranoia everywhere. I hate Mao but I am not so stupid to think that his image might not show up some place important at some time. He was (unjustifiably) an icon and there is not much we can do about that now. And it would not have surprised me (nor caused undue comment) if Hitler had been hung (hanged?) on the WH Xmas tree at some point by Bush. Tempests in tea cups are the rage of the day for the isolated, flaccid right wing. Let them stew and rage - and meanwhile, let's try to fix what's wrong in America without them. (Zero support to overhaul our inoperative health care system is about what we can expect from the mouth-foaming Repubs. Shame on all of them.)

[Electricgrendel]

If anyone ever had any doubts as to the fragility of Andrew Breitbart's grasp on reality, one need only read his response to this article. He has no sense of what is happening in Washington, and his propagandist heart should be nowhere close to art criticism. It really is a study of right wing delusion. Obama runs the town as a moderate and people like Breitbart are so far to the right that they scream "socialist!" Bush ran the town with an increasing entwining of corporate and government worlds (the very soul of fascism) and they cannot bother to raise a cry against him until doing so is politically expedient. Callow, hysterical and dangerous: the best way to describe Breitbart and the movement of which he is a part.

[Christopher Knight]

This is Christopher Knight replying to Andrew Breitbart: Oh dear. We only got to the second comment before Hitler's name was evoked, and in the very first sentence. Godwin's Law just morphed into Reductio ad Hitlerum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

[Joe Hill]

Andrew Breitbart's paranoid fantasies are right out of None Dare Call It Conspiracy and other such wingnut rubbish.

The bottom line is the krayzee right have lost their stolen grip on power, they have lost the American people and they have finally completely lost their minds.

Look for more of this manufactured outrage, crocodile tears, nationalism pretending to be patriotism and blind seething hatred from the lunatic fringe as the years pass of this and Obama's second term.

It's only a matter of time before they strap on the Semtex vests, offer a final prayer to the rotting corpses of Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan, and head for the streets to "defend 'Murica from the libruls.

[Mary]

I was surprised this jihadist-muslim anti-christian hard-left commie lib atheist democrat even allowed a christmas tree in the white house. But now I see why he did it ... mockery.

[Andrew Breitbart]

Smarty pants, I know about Godwin's Law is (we all read Kaus & Sullivan,) and I also know that scribes in the death throes of a showdown with the new and less ideologically uniform new media use snark and misdirection to avoid honest debate. Why does the left (news and entertainment media, in particular) give Mao and Stalin a major pass, and Hitler is the one who can't be used in a form of art without ascribing to the artist or possessor of said art the term 'Nazi' or 'Fascist'? (I'm not complaining about that, FYI. It's appropriate!) Lefties give Mao and Stalin a pass because they believe that there was value in what these tyrants were trying to achieve and forgive them for their evil accordingly. That is the point of mocking Obama for having the bad taste of employing a radical left wing political activist like Simon Doonan to decorate a Christmas tree. I am a secular Jew, bro. So I'm not Jerry Falwell here. It's just so clearly done in bad taste, at best, and in spite, at worst. Merry effin' Winter Solstice, Christopher.

[Michael McKinnon]

Mary, So much hatred in so few words. That is what 8 years of Bush, and a few months of Palin has done to this country

[Gran Tobal]

I'm really afraid we're getting the government we deserve.

[Fred Goepfert]

Another Liberal MSM whitewash of Obama's leftist leanings. Starting with his mother, continuing with his "mentor", then continuing with William Ayers in NYC and Chicago, this man has a background which would ordinarily not permit a high level security clearance. He had Warhol's Mao on a Christmas tree ornament.
At Christmas, did he have any ornaments with a picture of Christ?
The Liberal MSM would not like that, because it would take away from the pagan celebration they prefer to have.

[AtlasMugged]

They probably the ornament on the tree just to make Breitbart angry.

[Robert Smith]

Andrew Andrew Andrew - you, and those like you (who would rather jump to your right-wing conclusion before thinking things through) don't understand what Warhol was trying to do, let me help you out.

Notice the size of the portrait in the picture? Not unlike the egomaniacal statues, pictures, portraits of "leaders" found in every Communist country. Notice that Mao is tarted up? Warhol is defrocking Mao of the absurd illusion he (Mao) and his party pressed upon the Chinese population for decades. Not unlike what Brooks did to Hitler in a rather famous movie.

But we all get it. There's no fun to be had in that, is there? Not when you can get the tea bags all up in a frenzy, maybe make a few bucks in the iterim.

[Robert Smith]

One last thought before I go spend lots of money on sacred Christmas presents.

A tarted up picture of Dubya, on the White House tree? I'm sure the right-wingers would come to the natural conclusion that Obama and his administration were Bush loving welps.

[TK Major]

I'd say there is little point in approaching as sincere reflections of thought or sentiment the bloviation of those who have turned pandering to paranoia, prejudice, and pickled perspective into a lucrative profession.

Just as the current political positions of many Republican politicians seem designed for the sole purpose of crippling the current presidency -- no matter what harm they do to US taxpayers and citizens -- the supposed convictions of these 'punditainers' are as transparently strategic as they are unfounded in fact, logic, or common sense.

[Orneryguy]

BigGovernment.com also reported that one of the Christmas ornaments is Mt. Rushmore with one of the faces replaced with the current occupant of the White House. . . Nobel Peace Prize, Mt. Rushmore - Are these not premature?

[hf2hvit]

"The lesson learned is we can't trust you lefties with democracy and a free press."

Anybody who would say the above doesn't believe in a free press. What's next?

"If you don't think like me you're not allowed to have free thought"

[Mab Rockwell]

It looks to me like Andrew Breitbart really upsets the libs. It must be because he backed those two young people who did the number on the Acorn folks. Eat your hearts out, L A Times and libs. I remember when about 30 years ago, I subscribed to the L A Times. Then we left the country for 15 years, and when we returned we were in a state of cultural shock due to the MSM and LA Times.
All was liberal bias everywhere we went. Isn't it time for the above mentioned
newspaper to go honest instead of what you are now. I always refer to the newspaper as "the red sheet".
Aunty M