“The original piece of art is of a horse thief is fleeing a lynch mob. The Saturday Evening Post liked W.H.D. Koerner’s illustration so much it used it a year later to illustrate an a short story, “Ways that are Dark.” The caption under the illustration read: “Bandits Move About From Town to Town, Pillaging Whatever They Can Find.”
Koerner’s illustration was picked up again in 1918 by the magazine A Country Gentleman for the story, “A Charge to Keep.”

Dunno if it’s true, but if correct, calling the painting “A Charge to Keep” was not Bush’s invention, it’d been called that since 1918.

Among their statements on ethics, the APA says, “On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his/her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he/she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”

I realize psychotherapists and psychoanalysts are not the same as psychiatrists. I can’t imagine why the ethics of this situation would be different for them.

Here’s a pretty comprehensive blog post supposedly by a practicing psychoanalyst/psychiatrist, discussing similar ethical breeches or controversies:
http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/2006/10/psychblogging_a.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pATjJVdalZc

Horse thieves were not petty thieves. That was a hanging offense. I’m just sayin’.

And what a surprise . . .
– the psychoanalyst saw repression,
– the gender theorist saw sexual politics,
– the military historian more or less fabricated allusions to various military conflicts, and
– the politician/therapist sees a troubled, unquestioning mind while getting in a few digs at Bush’s history.

I’m pretty much with Mark on this one … it’s an amusing anecdote/coincidence, but the analysis is nearly all projection by people who disagree with and/or dislike the President.

hogwash.
it’s a guy riding a horse up a hill, like the president said. as for the rider’s character, that’s another story.
looking at this image and not being certain what it depicts, when it is basically a photorealistic painting of an outdoor scene, strikes me as the response of a schizophrenic, not a healthy mind.

For exactly the same reason, most of us don’t waste time researching the history of the machines in our lives, either. The machines, like the art, do what they do without us needing to know much about where they came from.

So if you think the Pres ought to be embarrassed by this, you should be embarrassed that you don’t know the history of the automatic transmission, power brakes, or front wheel drive. You’d appreciate your car so much more if you did (assuming you own a car–replace with obvious examples from other common machines as required.)

This is all best understood as an example of how monkeys over-interpret the behaviour of the alpha monkey.

The painting has a “merican” subject. It isn’t an abstract. It doesn’t do anything “freaky” with color or light. It has a landscape background. A landscape without the figures (action figures even) would have been more neutral, but Bush doesn’t worry about neutrality. And the comic book action is just the ticket for someone with the emotional sophistication of a 12 yr old.

If the Connecticut side of his upbringing was dominant, you’d see something different. It wouldn’t be a mere seascape. He’d have a huge grim oil painting of a pirate clinging to a ship’s wheel in the teeth of a gale. He would think it was a missionary sailing out to convert the heathens.

Yee-haw or Heave-to, it’s all the same stuff.

Bush: “It’s a cowboy. And he’s ridin’ a horsie!”

‘Nuff said.

If it doesn’t signify anything about the incumbent’s self-perception, it does offer some insight into his interest in the world around him. His entire administration is built around some notion of ideological purity, so the fact that no one had the curiosity to perform a cursory look into that painting and it’s provenance is telling. Imputing religious motives to a secular image is what people do when they see the Virgin Mary in a mold stain but at least that has an uncontroversial origin.

Pretty much sums it up…

He doesn’t know the origins of the painting. So what? So people who read this article now know a bit of trivia he doesn’t. So what?

I know plenty of artists and art appreciators who know nothing about the genesis of Picasso’s cubist work and the parallels in n-dimensional physics and Christian 2D “Gods Eye” artwork which date back to Egyptian art, and then the Renaissance move to 3D perspective, and the philosophical underpinnings for that. For that matter I know physicists who are also unaware of the connection but still enjoy the aesthetics of Picasso’s work. They all have a generally post modern, deconstructed, world view, regardless. They’re all curious people (unlike Bush) and know plenty of things I’m completely ignorant of.

The sort of pretentiousness which this article represents is amazingly counter productive. It’s exactly the sort of empty snobbery which greatly encourages rural folks to be more reactionary and vote for a-holes like Bush.

Also, the protagonist has a strong resemblance to him.

The painting was once used to illustrate a story “A Charge to Keep”. He likes it. So what?

I think some of you are truly nuts.

We have to remember that this is not interpretative art, but a commissioned illustration to depict a very specific situation.

So although the idea of interpreting art for one’s self and finding meaning in it is something that I myself strive for, when I look at an illustration of, let’s say… Superman (another piece of commissioned art for a publication), there is a specific back story, history, and -more importantly- intent to the art in question. One could look at the cover of Action Comics #1 and say “look at that villain smashing that car!” but we all know the specific intent of the illustration, and if we don’t a very cursory glance at the publication or a few keyboard taps would be able to set us strait about the illustration’s ‘ambiguous’ scenario.

If Bush had a painted illustration of Ted Bundy on his wall and told everyone who walked in his office that this was ‘us’, this was ‘America… clean cut and polite’ we’d all think he was nuts (well… more so than we do now). “But,” Bush says, “the guy who sold me the painting SAID he was nice!”

Ignorance is no excuse when information is so readily available… especially when you think some researcher or editor or President would have checked prior to borrowing the ‘name’ of his favourite painting for a book title.

I wonder which list of people is longer (news article writers, book editors, white house staff); people who have told Bush that he’s wrong about this, or people who know that telling him would do no good.

Bottom line? Bush assumed quite a bit about this illustrative painting, and the public, seeing him as some one who assumes quite a lot about quite a few things, views this story as a microcosm of his presidential tenure… and we all know what happens when Bush assumes too much.

It is sad, but I’m not surprised. Americans hate art. That’s why they say stupid things like it “means different things for different people” or “open to interpretation”. They hate it because if they want to enjoy it they’d need to actually think.

Americans love illustration. Americans hate art.

It’s probably obvious, but you would be hard pressed to find someone who dislikes Bush more than I do. However this armchair psychiatry is a bunch of crap. I might come up with a similar story behind the painting if I were told it was titled “A Charge to Keep”. Now if it were my favorite painting, I would probably look into its background. But I think I’m safe in assuming Bush doesn’t have my intellectual curiosity.

This is petty at best.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s not what Bush did. He heard a story about the picture, assumed it to be fact, and never questioned it. Sounds familiar.

Mark asked, “what’s wrong with coming up with your own interpretation of what a painting means?”

Nothing. Who in the article claimed Bush’s interpretation was wrong? I think the subject of what Bush might say about his favorite painting is interesting, and what’s more, the interpreters in this case have produced concise, creative, and amusing interpretations.

If the story offered by the “armchair” psychiatrists is such “crap” why claim that you (spigothead) might have come up with a similar story yourself?