“It’s trying a little too hard, smiling a little too earnestly, dressing a little too obviously-like Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Obama all wearing purple to signal the unity of red and blue, left and right,” wrote Rachel Tashjian at GQ after the inauguration. What, precisely, does it mean to say that the aesthetic taste of the Biden administration is corny? The aesthetic of Biden’s young presidency: extremely earnest and extremely on the nose In the Biden Oval Office, a sculpted bust of labor leader and activist Cesar Chavez is seen with a collection of framed photos on a table. It makes me as hopeful as anything that American democracy might be able to heal itself. It is the aesthetic of a state that devotes itself to people rather than to image control. ![]() Its dullness and lack of glamour is democracy’s appropriate response to the brutal drama of fascism, the regimented propaganda of totalitarian communism. This very corniness, I would like to argue, is the aesthetic that properly belongs to liberal democracy. But Biden’s aesthetic, as ushered in with a Norah Jones-quoting inauguration address and a redecorated Oval Office stuffed with the busts of notables, is one of old-fashioned corniness. ![]() Trump made it a place of pointedly vulgar kitsch, a haunted house with blood-red Christmas trees. Obama made the White House as close to cool as it has been since the Kennedy administration. As the Biden administration settles into the White House, the US is being treated to a presidential aesthetic we have not seen in decades: the boring and bureaucratic solidity of dad taste.
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