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GOP QUESTIONS HUNTER BIDEN’S BIG-MONEY ART SHOW. Influence peddler-turned-novice-artist Hunter Biden’s art exhibit, at which works will be priced from $75,000 to $500,000, will preview this month in California and move to a New York gallery in October. Given the possibility that buyers might purchase Hunter’s art in an attempt to influence his father, President Joe Biden, Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform are seeking answers to some basic questions about the event.
It’s an impossible mission for the GOP — nobody has to listen to the minority party. But in a new letter to New York gallery owner Georges Berges, committee ranking member James Comer asks for documents about the show’s inception and planning, about the setting of prices, about contracts between Biden and the gallery, and about a much-discussed set of “ethics guidelines,” reportedly worked out with the White House, covering the anonymity of buyers.
One obvious source for such information would be the Biden White House. But Comer notes that he has already tried asking the White House and has gotten nothing.
Republican investigators have a legitimate reason to be interested in Hunter Biden’s business dealings. Remember that Hunter, when his father was vice president, cashed in on lucrative deals in Ukraine and China. And then, not long before last year’s presidential election, when a laptop emerged with all sorts of information about Hunter’s sketchy business affairs — and, more importantly, about Joe Biden’s possible knowledge and involvement in those affairs — many in the press and social media suppressed the information.
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So Comer is on a firm foundation when he writes the following to Berges: “It is the Oversight Committee’s responsibility to scrutinize Mr. Biden’s business activities because he chooses to conduct them in the most murky and corrupt corners of international affairs. Moreover, he has chosen — in the latest iteration of his career — to sell commodities of fluid and opaque value to anonymous benefactors.”
That’s a pretty concise statement of the issue at hand. “Mr. Biden acknowledges it is ‘a hell of a lot easier to get noticed’ as an artist due to his family name,” Comer continues. “Given Mr. Biden’s connection to the White House, his network of foreign associates, your [Berges’s] efforts to become the ‘lead guy in China’ for art, and history of foreign nations that have ‘used transactions involving high-value art to evade sanctions imposed on them by the United States,’ the extent and nature of your dealings with Mr. Biden must be subject to the same scrutiny.”
Meanwhile, the exhibit’s curator has published an analysis of Biden’s work arguing that Biden, a drug addict, “turned to abstract art to heal himself.” The analysis contains long passages such as this, discovering deeply religious meanings in Biden’s work:
Each of the color patches are full of feeling, and in St. Alban and St. Ambrose cemented together by streams of blood — the red blood of the martyred saints? — in contrast to St. Thomas, where they tend to be packed together, at least in the lower half of the work, perhaps alluding to St. Thomas’ famously complex, dense writings. All of these works are symbolic abstractions, and all of them testify to Biden’s Catholic faith, which seems to have come to his rescue, raised his spirits, and restored meaning to his life, which perhaps had become meaningless because it perhaps had become too sinful — certainly, addiction is a sin against the self.
It is not clear whether the particular artwork under discussion will sell in the $75,000 range or in the $500,000 range. “The prices your gallery has set for these pieces by a new, untrained, celebrity artist are unprecedented,” Comer wrote to Berges. “One New York art adviser said such prices are ‘sort of insulting to the art ecosystem, as if anyone could do it.'”
Finally, Comer questions the secrecy surrounding who might buy such works at such prices. Berges and the White House reportedly worked together to come up with a system under which the buyers will be anonymous, but Berges, not White House ethics officials, will check them out to make sure there’s nothing fishy about their motives.
“Though the White House has attempted to allay concerns about the appearance of selling access to the president by developing guidelines for your gallery, these guidelines actually create more obscurity for the buyers of Mr. Biden’s compositions, each of which — at their lowest prices — exceeds the median annual income for the American household,” Comer writes.
Will the committee Republicans’ request yield results? Will Hunter Biden, and the White House, and the art gallery suddenly become more transparent about the exhibit? Don’t count on it. At the moment, with the GOP in the minority in both houses of Congress, and a Democrat, the father of the artist, in the White House, there is simply no way there will be any government scrutiny of the exhibit. That leaves only the press to look into things. But, of course, many major press outlets have actively suppressed negative information about Hunter Biden in the past. So look for the exhibit to go on, with key elements of it hidden from public view.
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