It looks like the prodigal son is a painter now. Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s child, has apparently been dabbling with paints for years. Now his hobby has turned serious: starting soon, you can pick up one of his colourful creations from a gallery in New York’s SoHo. It will cost you, though: the pieces are reportedly priced between $75,000 and $500,000.
Who parts with that much cash for the work of a new, not exactly critically acclaimed, painter? We may never know. Hunter’s new career raises obvious ethical issues for his father and, in an attempt to avoid accusations of influence peddling, the Biden administration has asked the gallerist to keep all information about the buyers and prices of Hunter’s work confidential. The gallery has also agreed to reject offers that seem suspiciously generous.
Even without those safeguards in place, I highly doubt Biden’s policies would be affected by sales of his son’s terrible paintings. (The New York Times generously described them as “leaning towards the surreal”, which is a polite way of saying: “Looks a bit like a Covid-stricken Mr Blobby vomited on a canvas.”) There are already plenty of other ways, after all, that you can “buy” influence in the US’s rich democracy. It is well established, for example, that you can donate your way to an ambassadorship. Still, the optics of Hunter’s pricey paintings aren’t great. In fact, the whole situation screams nepotism.
Weirdly, however, while the situation has raised a few eyebrows in the mainstream media, liberals haven’t been as outraged about the situation as one might expect. If Donald Trump Jr had been flogging art for oversized amounts while his dad was in office, I reckon the liberal reaction might be rather different. I get it: the Trump family set the bar for ethical conduct lower than a dungeon in hell. But, guess what? We don’t need to keep the bar there.
Joe Biden, by the way, seems to think that the guardrails he has put in place around Hunter’s artwork are an example of his administration raising the bar. “The president has established the highest ethical standards of any administration in American history,” the deputy White House press secretary said when questioned on the subject. “His family’s commitment to rigorous processes like this is a prime example.”
A rather better example of ethics in action, I think, is if Biden had had a rigorous conversation with his 51-year-old son and persuaded him to do as much painting as his heart desired, but leave off selling his work until daddy left office. I mean, Biden has made a big deal about how he is tough on Putin; if he gets an autocrat to do what he wants, surely he should be able to influence his own kid.
Ultimately, however, Hunter isn’t the real issue here: rather, he is the symptom of a far bigger problem. If you want to make it in a creative industry these days, talent is often secondary to money and connections. In the UK, for example, just 16% of people in creative jobs are from working-class backgrounds. The creative industry globally is full of variations of Hunter Biden: people whose parents’ names opened doors for them or whose parents’ money gave them the luxury to do unpaid internships or spend years working on their art without worrying about going hungry.
If you think it’s unfair to suggest Hunter wait a few years before selling his paintings, just think about all the far more talented, but far less privileged, artists whose work we’ll never get to see. And if you really think that Hunter’s paintings earned their price tag on artistic merit alone, then I have an overpriced painting of a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
