My EYES!

[Octafish]

38. This guy should have a show at a few Presidential Libraries.

Through his art, Colombian painter Fernando Botero breathes a new reality into the war in Iraq.



This exhibition opened a ways back at UC Berkeley. Details on the show and artist:

The art of Abu Ghraib

Louis Freedberg
Monday, January 22, 2007
SF Chronicle



AT LEAST two questions hang over the exhibit of Fernando Botero's paintings and drawings on the shameful abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that will open at the main library at UC Berkeley a week from today.

The first is what drove Botero, who typically draws whimsical, oversized pneumatic figures that have enormous popular appeal, to undertake these paintings in the first place.

The second is why they'll be displayed in a Berkeley library, rather than in the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim in New York, or SFMOMA.

SNIP…



He said he wasn't intending to “shock people or to accuse anyone” with his Abu Ghraib depictions. He didn't do them for commercial reasons (they're not for sale). “You do it because it is in your gut, you are upset, you are furious, you have to get it out of your system.”



Nonetheless, he hopes that as Abu Ghraib fades from memory -- the prison is slated for demolition -- the paintings will be a reminder of what happened there. “People would forget about Guernica were it not for Picasso's masterpiece,” he said. “Art is a permanent accusation.”



CONTINUED…

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/CALIFORNIA-CULTURES-The-art-of-Abu-Ghraib-2622260.php

In the process of interpreting his reactions to what he learned about the secret torture prison in Iraq, the artist has revealed Bush and his cronies to be sadistic, brutal, criminal, undemocratic and most NAZI like. That’s what the craziest emperors of Rome and the Fuehrer of the Third Reich and the kleptocratiest Mafiya boss do. May history record the policies and behavior of Bush and his cronies to be what it is, most un-American.



Of course, the actions of the Bush Empire gives rise to the question:

Will there be an Amerikan Gulag?

Perhaps not, if enough Americans see these pictures and understand the stories they tell.