I don’t know who the target market for a velvet painting of Pat Buchanan is supposed to be. Extremist right wingers aren’t known for their adeptness at parsing irony, and it seems doubtful that patrician right wingers would darken their homes with an objet with cultural connotations so déclassé. And I can’t see why even the most thrift-store hardened ironist would want such a thing around—I’ve harbored plenty of ironic art in my day, and while if I actually saw a velvet Pat Buchanan hanging somewhere I would surely say “WHOA, AWESOME,” not in a million lifetimes would I want that pasty, jowly, vulgar, hateful, fascist walrus staring down at me from the walls of my own home day in and day out.
 

 
And yet, the velvet Buchanan is a real thing that really exists and someone who is so inclined could, in principle, actually own it. In fact, Pat is one of many right wing icons whose velvety vileness is enshrined and sold at velvetpaintings.com (“Quality you can FEEL”), though the list of honorees on the site skids to a halt during the George W Bush administration.
 

 

 

 

 
I LOOOOOOVE how Newt Gingrich comes off looking like a sentient, murderous ventriloquist dummy in a cheap movie.

You’d think the folks with the luck to have landed a URL like “velvetpaintings.com” (the actual company name is “Indignico Inc.”, and all the images reproduced here are under its copyright) would update their site once a decade or so, but nope, it all seems to peter out in the mid-oughts. So I took a look at their eBay store to see if they had any more current offerings. There was much to be found—velvet Star Wars characters, requisite Elvii, Jesii, and purdy nekkid ladies, but a serious dearth of contemporary right wingers…except for Joe the Plumber.
 

 
I cursed the absence in Indignico’s oeuvre of Sarah Palin, Scott Walker, Mittens Romney, Mitch McConnell, Michele Bachmann, and the rest of the current pantheon of oligarchs’ lickspittles who may well be the literal death of us all. So as a last ditch, I searched Facebook. Oh, man—PAYDIRT. Not only is their FB photo album heavily larded with choice loathsomeness, it was on FB that I finally found solid confirmation of parodic intent. Their motto: “Ridiculing Republicans Since 1996.” Their mission statement: “Smothering The ‘Business-of-America-is-Business’ Fascists and their Consumer Zombie Army with yards and yards of Tijuana Black Velvet plus promote the practice of sloganeering as sales poetry for fun and profit.” Whoever these people are, I like ‘em.
 

 

 

 

 

 
Many thanks to Beth Piwkowski for this find.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Kaiju black velvet paintings
Velvet goldmine: black velvet paintings of David Bowie and Billy Dee Williams