Perhaps the most useful and candid image from the new website advertising Donald Trump’s digital trading card is at the bottom of the page, where Trump gives two thumbs up while winking at the viewer. The two-pronged message seems simple: Everything is A-OK, and this is all a bit of a joke.
Trump NFT is not art. Unless you’re considering seizing an art form.
People certainly laughed heartily on Thursday when Trump made what he had billed as a “big announcement.” He now offered for sale “limited edition” digital trading cards, featuring what appeared to be highly amateurish images of the former president playing golf, posing as an astronaut, surrounded by gold bars and shooting lasers from his eyes.
This latest entrepreneurial effort from a businessman with countless failures and bankruptcies appears to be a belated attempt to cash in on the “non-fungible tokens” market. NFTS includes the sale of images given a unique digital stamp and thus, theoretically, an artificial scarcity. NFTS uses bitcoin technology and can be bought and sold like any other commodity. The market for them may have peaked in 2021 with the sale of a $69 million digital collage by an artist called Beeple. Since then, the market has crashed.
Critics derided the crude iconography of the images and their clumsy construction. The website “Collect Trump Cards” attributes the designs to Clark Mitchell, an artist specializing in popular images, saying: “He has prominent working relationships with brands such as Star Wars, Hasbro, Mattel, Marvel.” Mitchell has a fundamental mastery of the hypermasculine tropes of comic book culture and professional sports.
If the images displayed on the site are anything like the digital images that will be transferred to anyone who pays the $99 fee, the Trump cards will feature clumsy Photoshop images of the former president’s face grafted onto reasonably fit male bodies, dressed in various costumes of masculine bravado, including tracksuits, a sheriff’s tassel and lots of blue suits.
The Lincoln Project, a political action committee that specializes in slickly produced social media mockery of Trump, posted a clip of the online video announcement layered with canned laughter. “Stop. We can only laugh so much,” said the tweet, which had received more than 19,000 likes a day after the big announcement.
Along with the laughter, however, was the pervasive sense that this latest scheme has distilled the essence of Trump to its purest form. It was “on brand” in a way more telling and troubling than previous attempts to cash in on a name once associated with the Oval Office.
We can look to some of the darker trends in the contemporary art market to sharpen that intuition. In his announcement, Trump wrote, “These limited edition cards feature the amazing ART of my Life & Career!”
Art was prominently capitalized, sharpening the dissonance between a word that conjures up thoughts of Leonardo, Rembrandt and Picasso and the image that followed — Trump as a superhero in tights and a cape. A similar dissonance is often felt in contemporary art museums and markets when seemingly trivial or worthless objects – trash or items found on the street, random memories plucked from the memory cabinet – are repurposed as art and treated as both intellectually significant and commercially valuable.
The shorthand critique of this phenomenon is, “My kid could do that.” And in fact, if your child has even a passing familiarity with pop culture tropes and basic proficiency with photo-editing software, your child can probably make photos of Trump as laughably awful as the ones Trump is now trying to sell.
In the art world, the conceptual move that rebrands supposed junk as art is not quite so simple. It has a long pedigree, dating back to the work of Marcel Duchamp, whose infamous “finished” sculpture included a 1917 work known as “Fountain,” a urinal turned 90 degrees on its axis and signed with a cipher for the artist’s name. And, yes, your child could probably move a urinal and sign their name to it, but they probably couldn’t do it at just the right historical moment to usher in a century of discussion about what constitutes art. Is it the material object or the idea? An original form or its iteration?
People laughed at Duchamp’s urinal, and they still laugh at its descendants, which can be found in galleries and art markets around the world. This is not to argue that Trump’s ART is art. It is not. What matters here is how laughter defines community and how closely Trump’s attempt to market amateurish iconography parallels the way artists, critics and collectors have used laughter to establish the boundaries of the art world.
Simply put, if you can’t take Duchamp or conceptual art seriously, you’re a philistine, by the art world’s definition. It proves that you are unwilling or incapable of a basic set of thought exercises and mental exercises essential to the appreciation of contemporary art. One of the hallmarks of Trump’s art, and the work of other artists who have tried to market Trump’s images as art, is the expectation that the elite will laugh at it. Those who laugh are immediately outside the world of Trump, where a taste for the vulgar has been established as a basic sabbath of loyalty and belonging.
Call it reverse philistinism: using deliberately bad imagery, perhaps with a wink, to create an “us-them” dynamic. Other artists who join Trump have also done this. Jon McNaughton, who calls himself “America’s foremost conservative artist,” has created horrific depictions of Trump as a holy figure who nurtures a suffering America to revive its idealism and find its true soul. But he also created a cartoonish image of Trump and his wife, Melania, riding in a giant flag-draped truck, titled “Keep on Trumpin’,” a reference to a 1968 counterculture cartoon, “Keep on truckin’.” by artist Robert Crumb.
The text below the image (available as a signed canvas print for $399) makes the economics of reverse philistinism explicit: “YOU can be a TRUMP SUPPORTER if you think it’s patriotic to attach American flags to a jacked-up 4-wheeler! … YOU can be a TRUMP SUPPORTER if you hang McNaughton Paintings in your house!” McNaughton also sells Trump NFTs, and Trump’s recent entry into that market is likely an attempt to bolster the competition.
Another artist, Julian Raven, began an ultimately fruitless battle with the Smithsonian in 2017 after the National Portrait Gallery refused to hang his 16-foot painting of Trump’s head next to a soaring eagle and American flag, a portrait that was only marginally better than Trump’s. exchange card. Raven’s challenge to an established museum was a public performance, designed in part to suggest that the Portrait Gallery’s standards of quality and inclusion were simply irrational, and if you believe in reverse philistinism, they are. When “high art” expanded its boundaries to include “bad art” or things that were never meant to be art, the creators of bad art gained the power to challenge the institutional authority of the art world.
Strategically, of course, the best thing for the Trump brand, the best hope for maintaining his popularity, is to get people who are inclined to laugh at Trump to keep laughing at Trump. This infuriates his supporters, who feel they are the ones being laughed at, in turn inspiring the purely tribal sense of identification with the former president.
The joke will ultimately unfortunately come at the expense of people paying $99 for his NFTs, which, despite what appears to be an initial wave of interest, are likely to be extremely risky as a long-term investment. But it’s also very relevant to Trump, a perfect distillation of his unique take on marketing. NFTS is one reductio ad absurdum of art: You don’t pay for an object or a thing, just an idea or a feeling. Trump does the same for politics: When you invest in him (with your votes, your financial support, or simply your affection), you get next to nothing tangible in terms of policy or achievements. But you will belong to his society, with all its intangible but non-fungible benefits.
