|
Every writer has an angle
It seems to me that Gopnik's attack was more on the clients who commission the artwork, rather than the artists who give them what they want. It's unfortunate that he chose to use Tom's fine painting as an example of what he considers to be the bad side of official portraiture, but I think it's pretty clear to anyone who paints portraits for a living that you can't pay a lot of bills by painting people with "warts and all."
As a personal aside to Thomas, a similiar thing happened to me a couple of years ago when Texas Monthly called and asked if they could do a story on me after a piano competition in Las Vegas. (They had gotten a press release about the competition.) When the article came out, I was listed among the 100 most bizzare things that happened in the last year. I was mad at first, but I gotta say in hindsight that the article was the best thing that ever happened to me. There's no such thing as bad publicity.
Robert
|