The current president isn’t a cultural tastemaker like his predecessors were. Do the aesthetics of the presidency still matter?
Biden's presidency has been marked by the absence of a defining aesthetic. | POLITICO illustration/Photos: AP; GettySophie Haigney is a journalist and critic with a focus on visual art, books and technology.
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama helped to reinforce the idea of the American president as a cultural tastemaker-in-chief. | AP Photos and Getty Images Childe Hassam's “The Avenue in the Rain" painting hangs alongside busts of Rosa Parks and President Abraham Lincoln in Biden's Oval Office. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Even George W. Bush, a scion of the political elite, fashioned a certain cultural aesthetic while in office, positioning himself as a swaggering Texas cowboy, a phony persona well-tailored to the post-9/11 era. Meanwhile, Biden’s Oval Office includes loads of representations — busts of César Chávez, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., for example, as well as what Finnegan calls the “wall of men.” Above the fireplace, she explains, presidents traditionally have hung a single painting or portrait, or just a few; they often take photos with foreign leaders sitting in front of the space.
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