Today, there is really no urgency to reflect on Jon McNaughton’s body of work. Adam Lehrer’s recent article in Compact, “The Limits of MAGA Art,'' stakes this out clearly. There is much less danger to endorsing McNaughton in the midst of a failing Biden presidency than there was at the height of anti-Trump hysteria . . . Why address it at all then?

For moderns, art is the appearance of suffering from the unrealized potential of freedom, i.e., the appearance of freedom’s task.

“From the artist’s perspective, it's the case that all art has to be a reconsideration of art history. Every artwork, in order to find its originality, has to reconsider all of art history.”