Essay:
Making Things RightCan the far right make good art?
( 1 ) The consolidation of the art world through blue-chip galleries, global art fairs and market-driven biennials has pushed contemporary art toward legibility and institutional favor, in the process leaving less room for ambiguity, irony or experimentation.
( 2 ) In 2011, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow mocked McNaughton’s painting The Forgotten Man, which depicts a dejected man seated on a park bench in front of the White House, surrounded by past presidents—some shown in distress at his situation—while Barack Obama stands on the US Constitution. The segment went viral, significantly boosting McNaughton’s visibility and helping establish his status as a cult conservative artist whose notoriety, in part, feeds on liberal scorn. In 2016, the painting was purchased by conservative television host Sean Hannity.
In the popular imagination, the political left makes art and the right makes propaganda. One embraces ambiguity, subversion and conceptual risk, dominating galleries and critical discourse; the other traffics in nostalgia, sentimentality and moral instruction. The left has the establishment in a choke hold, while the right fights for space on bumper stickers and novelty mugs.
The truth is that this divide is more myth than fact—an aesthetic fiction layered onto politics. But in recent years, the illusion has started to fray. As digital platforms flatten the hierarchy between high and low culture, and as ideology is increasingly expressed through spectacle and speed, old binaries no longer hold. A TikTok video might carry the same emotional weight as a museum artifact; a meme about prison abolition can circulate with the punch of a political poster. What once looked like opposing artistic impulses now overlap: irony and sincerity, critique and nostalgia, outrage and order.
This collapse is visible on both sides of the spectrum. Much of what’s called “progressive art” has adopted a tone of moral urgency, foregrounding justice, identity and institutional critique while embracing the very didacticism it once disavowed—think Hank Willis Thomas’ For Freedoms billboards, which turn public art into overt political messaging. At the same time, elements of the right have seized the tools of transgression—provocation and parody primary among them—and begun to wield them in a way that feels more avant-garde than old-fashioned.
( 1 ) The consolidation of the art world through blue-chip galleries, global art fairs and market-driven biennials has pushed contemporary art toward legibility and institutional favor, in the process leaving less room for ambiguity, irony or experimentation.
( 2 ) In 2011, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow mocked McNaughton’s painting The Forgotten Man, which depicts a dejected man seated on a park bench in front of the White House, surrounded by past presidents—some shown in distress at his situation—while Barack Obama stands on the US Constitution. The segment went viral, significantly boosting McNaughton’s visibility and helping establish his status as a cult conservative artist whose notoriety, in part, feeds on liberal scorn. In 2016, the painting was purchased by conservative television host Sean Hannity.
