Hunter Biden Has Left Lobbying to Become a Fine Artist. So What Does the Art World Think of Joe Biden’s Son’s Work?

We learned a lot about Hunter
Biden in the wake of the scandal that saw President Trump
attempting to strong-arm Ukraine into investigating the son of
former Vice President Joe Biden, who could be running against Trump
for the presidency later this year if he wins the democratic
nomination.

But in all the unearthed stories about Hunter Biden’s struggles with addiction, the child he
fathered with a stripper while dating the widow of his deceased
brother, Beau Biden, one tidbit that might have gotten lost in the
shuffle is that he is also an artist.

In a profile published today in
the New York
Times, Biden, who
turned 50 this month, discusses his burgeoning practice of
making blown ink
abstractions on paper.

Inviting the newspaper into his
pool house-turned-art studio in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles,
Biden explains how art helped him overcome addiction and provided a
kind of sanctuary while his name was paraded across the tabloids.
He also demonstrated his technique of blowing alcoholic ink with a
metal straw, saturating Japanese Yupo paper with spore-like rings of muted
color. 

The occasion marked the first
time that Biden has shared his work with the
world. “For years I
wouldn’t call myself an artist,” said Biden, who has previously
worked as a lobbyist, a venture capitalist, and an investor. “Now I
feel comfortable saying it.”

While Biden has been earnest in
his embrace of art, the industry has been more reticent to embrace
him. Employing an accomplished film producer as an ad-hoc agent
last year, Biden went on a campaign to sign with a gallery, but
found no takers. 

Critics, too, seem unenthused. “Generic Post Zombie Formalism illustration” is
how Jerry Saltz, New
York magazine critic and
author of the forthcoming book How to Be an
Artist, characterized Biden’s work in an email to Artnet
News.

Saltz also offered a few words
of advice: “Lose the
big signature at once; forget the Kusama dots altogether;
experiment with the surface and color and tools. Really consider
the whole-page as a space and not make everything derivative
all-over composition. The background doesn’t always have to be
white, you big baby.”

Meanwhile, art critic Scott Indrisek, former deputy editor of
Artsy, had this to say: “Hunter’s paintings have a kind of vaguely
scientific, vaguely psychedelic vibe that reminds me of Fred
Tomaselli—if Fred Tomaselli started making art for dermatologists’
waiting rooms. But then again, the process here seems more
important than the finished product. I guess it’s important that
wounded men of a certain age and privileged background have the
opportunity to find themselves creatively… it’s just too bad that
everyone else is expected to pay attention.”

Artnet News’s own art critic Ben
Davis had a somewhat more favorable
response: “As digital
images, at least, they are pleasing. It’s hard to say what they
look like without seeing how the actual paper holds the ink. You
can’t really judge it from your desktop.”

“It doesn’t seem like there’s a
style or a theme, just a kind of
seeing-what-pattern-the-ink-suggests kind of thing,” Davis added.
“It seems like he’s trying to occupy his mind, and three of the
four you see kind of read as trying to fill up the empty space and
to make some structure out of a mess—so pretty allegorical in terms
of where he finds himself.”

The post Hunter Biden Has Left Lobbying to Become a Fine
Artist. So What Does the Art World Think of Joe Biden’s Son’s
Work? appeared first on artnet News.