Hope Has Been A Bust
This image-only document hijacks the Huffington Post's visual authority to resurrect Williams's ObamaHopeScam.com as the Obama-era rhetoric of hope begins to curdle. The page frames Arianna Huffington's "Hope Has Been A Bust" headline as proof that the 2008 campaign's central emotional commodity has failed its public test. Beneath the faux-blog masthead, Williams inserts his own earlier critique of the Obama HOPE campaign, accusing its poster-image machinery of fraudulence, criminality, and Nike-style branding theft. The work is less an essay than a political-media collage, using screenshot aesthetics to trap campaign idealism inside the mechanisms of publicity. Its force comes from treating hope not as belief but as a licensed image product whose invoice has come due.
- DATE:
- January 19, 2010
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- PUBLICATION / VENUE:
- Huffington Post
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Arianna Huffington; Barack Obama; Shepard Fairey; Sarah Palin; Conan O'Brien
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- The Huffington Post; ObamaHopeScam.com; MyArtSpace.com; Time; Los Angeles Times; The Estate of LG Williams
- KEYWORDS:
- Obama hope curdled; Huffington Post authority hijacked; ObamaHopeScam resurrected; campaign rhetoric vs reality; hope as failed commodity; post-2008 disillusionment