By: Charles Hilu
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/author/charles-hilu
When most professional artists begin their careers, they are often lucky not to starve. This general rule, like most rules, does not apply if you are the son of the president of the United States.
Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, recently started painting and has agreed to put some of his art up for sale in a gallery, some of which may fetch as much as $500,000.
>>“How much of that value is due to the art itself? That's easy: None of it,” wrote Jeffry Cudlin, professor of art curatorial studies and practice at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in an email to the Washington Examiner. “They're fine decorative amateur work. Hey, everybody needs a hobby!”
Though Biden’s artwork might raise an eyebrow or two, none of his paintings were particularly memorable, Cudlin said. They might fetch between $850-$3,000 for a buyer “to hang over someone’s couch.”
>>“If Hunter Biden were applying to school to get a BFA in painting, I think a portfolio with these pieces in it would indicate some sense of the medium, some nascent talent, and encourage anyone reviewing it that with a little training and a little study, Biden might one day make some interesting paintings,” he said.
Cudlin distinguishes “avant-garde gallery culture,” which is filled with people advancing the medium and creating critically acclaimed pieces of art, from “traditional gallery culture,” which is filled with rich people who like to surround themselves with cool stuff.
>>“I don’t paint from emotion or feeling,” Biden said in the interview. “Which I think are both very ephemeral. For me, painting is much more about kind of trying to bring forth what is, I think, the universal truth.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/hunter-biden-what-art-curator-says