THE KOOKENHEIM

How Trump Returns — An Art Review

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ART REVIEW — “My #MOSen platform” By Republican Rep. Billy Long.

Rarely have the realms of politics and art collided with such disquieting force as in this new digital work from artist Billy Long. The fact that Billy Long is an actual U.S. Representative, and is actually running for U.S. Senate bestows upon this audacious work a power art rarely achieves. It is the “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” of Stupid Tweets.

In this critic’s estimation, Rep. Long’s “#MyMOSen platform,” represents either a low point for politics or a high water mark for satire. The fact that it is probably both signals a turbulent new era in American Art.

His three-step plan to re-instate Donald Trump as President is a Shakespearean restoration tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing less than a once great nation losing its last marble.

Step One, “get Kamala Harris to resign.” No specifics are offered as to how or why the Vice President should resign. Clearly, details are the province of wonks and snowflakes. Rep. Long is the architect, must he also install the toilets and design the drapes? Twitter is a rules-free space, where, God-like, his agenda alone prevails. Note how the words “want” and “get” become interchangeable.

Step Two, “Have POTUS appoint Trump as VP.” Again, Rep. Long’s veiled longing bursts forth as a decree, but this time with such transgressive force as to make Step One seem quaint, even probable.

If you accept that the first woman of color ever to serve as Vice President will meekly resign, you will also accept that Joe Biden will then select, ahead of all other possible candidates, his arch-enemy, the Worst Person in the World.

Like “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” after the protean Long has willed this profoundly witless idea into the Universe of Possibilities, he defies that Universe to reject it. The seeds of doubt, and of dumb, have been sown.

If “A,” then why not “B”? If “B”, then why not “ZBKXZXKXZKXKZXKX?”

Step Three, “Get Joe Biden to resign.” The Demiurge speaks. The planets align. The agent of corruption steps aside in shame and the sunshine of MAGA blazes anew. With “Step One” and “Step Two” achieved, “Step Three” is a formality, paperwork. (“Finish Keystone XL” and “Finish the Wall” are lagniappes. After-dinner mints.)

Yes, “#MyMOSen platform” is unrealistic. So is “Prufrock.” So is “The Rite of Spring.” So is “Nude Descending A Staircase.” For today’s Republican Party, “facts,” “logic,” “empirical evidence” are dead, and what’s filling the void are perfervid fantasias of naked emotional need. Let’s call it what it is.

Art.

The shock of Impressionism, the rude absurdity of Dada, the dreamscapes of Surrealism, the controlled chaos of Abstract Expressionism, the cynical money grubbing of Pop all bleed into the mixed-media miasma of Trumpism.

For Rep. Long, the Second American Revolution will bloom in the fever swamps of the Right Brain, not in the sterile fact grids of the Left. Forget Paul Krugman. Think Ornette Coleman. Pere Ubu. FLUXUS. Radical aesthetic disruption. The Death of Meaning.

So convincingly outré are his tweets that it is possible Rep. Long is satirizing the dramatic excesses of colleagues like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. If so, he is a Deep Method master, the Andy Kaufman of Performative White Grievance.

Equally possible is that Rep. Long is exactly as advertised — a craven Trump lick-spittle, employing autocratic and infantile methods to gain attention in a party that has become increasingly unmoored, unethical and desperate.

So who is the real Billy Long? The genius of “#MyMOSen platform” is that the man who created it doesn’t know, doesn’t care and would rather be eating a pulled pork sandwich.

Like Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, “#MyMOSen platform” challenges the viewer’s basic assumptions about reality up to and beyond acceptable limits. In Long’s hands, Magritte’s painting might be retitled “This Is A Pipe And I Will Keep Repeating It Until I Break Your Brain.”

Formally rigorous, dangerously banal, this Know Nothing masterpiece of magical thinking and rump ignorance crystalizes our current zeitgeist for generations to come. More breathtaking still, is that the artist may have done so by accident.

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Thanks to Amy Sea, Demoiselle D’Muddyum

Want more? Follow T. Kent Jones and MuddyUm.