New Revelations About Hunter Biden's Art Dealer Make Art Deal Even Shadier
You seriously can’t make this stuff up.
First son Hunter Biden’s incredibly suspicious art career couldn’t possibly get any more suspicious at this point, not if he were directly selling his artwork for billions of dollars to Iranian mullahs.
He’s not, as far as we know, but with the incredibly dubious means through which the Biden administration is vowing to establish ethics are preserved as he sells his mediocre work, there’s no telling who is buying it at this point.
This week, Fox News reported that Georges Bergès, the owner of the Manhattan art gallery where the problematic political son will be launching his new art career, declared in 2015 that he wanted to be the “lead guy” in China’s burgeoning art world (which is, apparently, a thing).
Not only is Bergès the proprietor of the establishment where Hunter’s paintings could be listed for as much as $500,000 — an astronomical sum for any artist, let alone an amateur — but he was also touted by the White House as the person they have trusted to make sure that there’s no potential for influence peddling as Hunter Biden, a man long accused of selling access to his powerful father and benefitting handsomely from his family name, sells the art he just started making five seconds ago for tens of thousands of dollars.
See what I mean? I couldn’t possibly make up something this absurd to add to the menagerie of reasons why we should be incredibly concerned about Hunter Biden’s art career as a matter of national security.
“White House officials have helped craft an agreement under which purchases of Hunter Biden’s artwork — which could be listed at prices as high as $500,000 — will be kept confidential from even the artist himself, in an attempt to avoid ethical issues that could arise as a presidential family member tries to sell a product with a highly subjective value,” The Washington Post reported earlier this month.
“Under an arrangement negotiated in recent months, a New York gallery owner is planning to set prices for the art and will withhold all records, including potential bidders and final buyers. The owner, Georges Bergès, has also agreed to reject any offer that he deems suspicious or that comes in over the asking price, according to people familiar with the agreement.”
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, as it happens, a lot; this is insanity, the world has gone mad. I can’t even believe this is real life at this point.
As Fox discovered, in 2015, Bergès told the bougie magazine Resident that as China’s influence over the world had grown economically, he had become fascinated with its art scene.
So this guy is totally the right person to make sure that Hunter Biden isn’t bought — a guy who has business ties to China, where Hunter Biden is accused of having been bought.
“China’s economy is transforming the global economy and everything is changing because of a rising China. But beyond that, what fascinates me is the cultural impact that China is having on the world. How is China affecting the global art community?” Bergès told interviewer George Wayne.
He explained he had been flying to the communist nation to “further my embrace of the rising China and its undisputable growing influence of contemporary art,” and that while power and money may “come and go,” “when you make a cultural impact on society, that lasts forever.”
“Cultural power is real power. That is the reason America continues to be the capital of the world, because of its influence on culture for generations and on an unrivaled global level,” he explained. “And I think more and more the Chinese are beginning to understand that cultural innovation will power their future cultural influence across continents. And what will drive that cultural empowerment?”
This is actually remarkably insightful about the means through which China is managing to sneak its influence into Western society, but that’s a topic for another day.
Bergès, who also told Quest magazine in 2015 that he had been flying to China regularly, was also quoted in the Bejing mouthpiece China Daily for his work with an event that promoted Chinese artists whose work he described as “not just pretty objects to create, but [that] also challenge the locals’ perceptions of what China is and the institutions they live with.”
Given this is Chinese Communist Party-run news, it’s unlikely he meant that the perceptions “challenged” by this meaningful artwork were those favorable to the authoritarian regime, it is worth noting.
In 1998, Bergès was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and making “terrorist threats,” although the latter charge was later dismissed, according to the New York Post.
In 2018, however, he settled out of court with investor Ingrid Arneberg after the latter accused Bergès of defrauding her for $500,000 in 2016.
Again, this is the guy who has pinky-promised the White House that neither Hunter Biden nor the American public will ever know who buys the first son’s amateur artwork by way of assurance that there won’t be any influence peddling going on.
A guy who loves the Chinese art scene, flies to China frequently and aspires to greatness in the Chinese art world.
Meanwhile, do not forget that Hunter Biden himself still owns stake in a Chinese private equity firm that the Biden camp promised he would unload before his father took office. If he’s selling his paintings to CCP-linked buyers, I wonder how much the “big guy” is going to get this time — or how dangerous such a deal could be for our country?
By the way, even if it were ethical to merely keep the names of art buyers private from Hunter Biden and the public, this week, a spokesperson for Georges Bergès gallery told CBS News that the artist is “looking forward” to attending his openings, where prospective buyers will also be. So even this flimsy, pathetic promise that Hunter will be carefully kept away from rich people who want to buy his paintings has gone completely out the window.
I can only imagine what Jen Psaki is going to have to say this time to try to keep her finger in the dam.
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