[Source: telegraph.co.uk]

By Steve Brown

Covert Action Magazine

Hunter Biden has discovered a sly new way to sell his famous family name to corrupt foreign billionaires and oligarchs. If his powerful father continues to help him behind the scenes—by twisting arms and dangling tempting U.S. loan packages—Joe Biden’s little boy might eventually wind up as rich as Donald Trump’s little girl.

Recently, like many other famous people from Sylvester Stallone, Johnny Depp and Marilyn Monroe to Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra—not to mention past Presidents such as Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush—Hunter Biden, second son of President Joe Biden, has taken up painting in order to, as he explained in a recent New York Times puff piece, “keep me sane.”

But his new profession is designed to keep him wealthy, too.

Georges Bergès, owner of the elegant Georges Bergès Gallery in New York’s tony Soho district, has announced that this October his entire gallery will be given over to a solo exhibition of Hunter Biden’s paintings. Hunter is a former lawyer and lobbyist with no art training who has never sold a single work in the commercial art market. But his paintings will be offered for sale at prices starting at “only” $75,000 for works on paper to $500,000 for larger canvasses, the gallery owner said.

Are Hunter’s paintings really worth half a million dollars?

They may well be—to corporate lobbyists on the make, foreign countries angling for U.S. loans, or government contractors looking for a sweetheart deal—all of whom would gladly pay through the nose for Hunter’s paintings in hopes of getting a smile and a thumbs-up from his father.

When Jeffry Cudlin (Professor of Curatorial Studies and Practice at the Maryland Institute College of Art) was asked by the Washington Examiner, “How much of the value [of Hunter’s paintings] is due to the art itself? he replied, “That’s easy: None of it … They’re fine decorative amateur work. Hey, everybody needs a hobby!” Cudlin put their value at $850 to $3,000.

The Art Critic of New York magazine, Jerry Saltz, called Hunter’s work “Generic Post Zombie Formalism.”

As reported in Artnet, art critic Scott Indrisek, former editor-in-chief of Modern Painters magazine, said that, “Hunter’s paintings … remind me of … art for dermatologists’ waiting rooms.” He also compared the paintings to a screensaver and told the Washington Post, “It’s the most anonymous art I can imagine … somewhere between a screen saver and if you just Googled ‘midcentury abstraction’ and mashed up whatever came up.”

Little wonder that the White House is embarrassed at the prospect of this art sale, since it has provoked allegations that it is just another attempt by Hunter to trade on his father’s name and high public office—as he has been accused of doing in his previous questionable business dealings overseas, which have sparked the current investigation into Hunter’s finances by the Department of Justice.

But Joe Biden won’t try to stop Hunter from selling his paintings.

Instead, he is giving him a green light. Under a special “ethics protocol” worked out between the White House and the Georges Bergès art gallery, there will be no objection to Hunter’s paintings being sold for up to $500,000—as long as all buyers’ identities are kept secret from the public, and presumably from Hunter himself.

This is supposed to protect the government from those who might want to buy access or special treatment. But it will do exactly the opposite. Since the buyers will be anonymous, “you won’t be able to follow the money,” as pointed out by The Art Newspaper.

Which means that a lobbyist, or a government contractor, or a foreign government can’t really be prevented from secretly buying a $500,000 painting—and putting the money into Hunter Biden’s bank account—in order to get favored treatment from his father.

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/07/16/white-house-grants-hunter-biden-a-license-to-swill/