Even before he was elected President of the United States, Donald Trump was an American icon and that was the 1990s. Many successful television series wanted to see him as a guest star: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where he appears alongside a very young Will Smith; Sex and the City, sitting at a small table next to Samantha; sitcom The Babysitter, where he is introduced simply as “Donnie”. A bit of postmodern hype and a bit of trump pop, from Spin City with Michael J. Fox to an animated version in an episode of The Simpsons… Then the movie, from the famous cameo in the blockbuster Mom I flew back to Celebs in Zoolander “Woody Allen, and this is already 2000, and the comedy “Two Weeks Notice” with Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock.
And then, art. In 2002, Andrés Serrano, a controversial New York artist and photographer, created a series of super color portraits of characters reflecting the reality of the country (name: America), among them – with sparkling hair and a regimental tie – the face of a magnate, a prominent billionaire entrepreneur, a hero of marital gossip , star of the reality show “The Apprentice” and future president. Eric Fischl portrayed Trump with a flamboyant clown nose at The Presence of Absence in London. In 2018, a group of activists created a giant balloon depicting Donald Trump as a child, with a mobile phone in one hand and a diaper, raised into the air in protest during his visit to the UK (and more than one English museum asked for the opportunity to include in their collections Trump balloon). At the 2019 Affordable Art Fair, Donald’s rework appeared as the Joker, Batman’s antagonist, in profile against a dark background. Yang Pei Ming, another world star artist, painted her with her mouth open and growling against a dark background: the work was presented in 2018 at the Frieze New York exhibition and was valued at $140,000. And digital artist Beeple sold a second video of a dejected Trump after his election defeat for $6.6 million in 2021.
Trump kitsch, Trump freak. Hybrid Trump. Trump in the style of Obey in the image of Barack Obama in the painting “Hope”. Trump’s superpop icon. Body and face as a political battlefield and propaganda tool: the border of flesh, colors and pixels of political communication. The consecration took place yesterday. With his arrest, Donald Trump finally entered the museum of 21st century art. Photo number P01135809, “white male, height 1.92 cm, weight 97 kilograms, strawberry-blond hair, blue eyes” turned into an icon of his judicial martyrdom, an election poster, a gadget (immediately appeared in e-commerce). -T-shirts with a photo print and the words “Never give up”, cost: $ 34) and in a miraculous image for very religious Trumpians. Then, with the spontaneity of a work of art in the age of digital reproduction, the photograph—frowning brows, angry and intense gaze directed straight at the camera, studied and very level-headed—became an instant meme, replicated in hundreds of photomontages. quotes, remakes, decontextualizations. Fluorescent Trump in Andy Warhol’s pop art version. Trump as Lucian Freud. Trump in black and white version of Rudolf Stingel.
Is Donald Trump the new Marina Abramovich?
This is true. Never before has a former US president been photographed. But never before had he had a real chance of being in the National Portrait Gallery. Someone has already posted a historical photograph on social media, reworked and enlarged, and two sellers are hanging it on the wall of the museum. Yes, it’s fake. However, as Trump has taught us, this is just a signature, far from the truth.