Botero Immortalizes Bush

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/lamo06042005.html


Dante with a Brush

Every presidency leaves its marks on history. For George W. Bush, these marks now include an immortalization by one of the most celebrated painters in the world, Fernando Botero -- but the memories immortalized may not be the ones the president wants remembered.

Highlighting the human rights abuses and acts of torture committed under Bush, an exhibition of 50 paintings by Botero will open June 16th at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. The exhibit focuses on the horrors of the Abu Ghraib prison, and marks a new theme for Botero's work, including his famous "gordos", which has previously been shown in museums and galleries from New York to Paris.

Colombia's "Diners Magazine", in a worldwide exclusive, recently reproduced samples of Botero's latest exhibit . Therein, readers can experience, in Botero's inimitable style, the images that have made up one of the most shameful, cruel, and inhuman episodes of Bush's regime, and of United States military history: the base humiliation and torture of countless Iraqis, guilty of nothing more than occupying the wrong space at the wrong time. These images will doubtless join the collective human psyche, adding another layer to the strata of man's inhumanity to man, joining previous chapters, from the Spanish Inquisition to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

Through the smoke and mirrors of the neo-conservative ideology, what was once regarded by some as "the foremost democracy on earth" has been made into the foremost representation of torture in our time, and been captured by Botero's brushes, exemplifying on canvas how quickly the thin layers of civilization can be peeled away to reveal emotions and motives so recently believed to have no place in our modern world.
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here is one of the pictures, in case the bushgang destroys the Palazzo Venezia

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. I love Botero

and recently became aware of this

[Inland]

2. An artist known for his comical representations driven to poltics by Bush

outrages. Bush really is a uniter.