America

Vincent van Gogh, Landscape with Snow, 1888. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Thannhauser Collection.

Anybody's guess why Donna Hayashi Smith, who's been a curator with the White House collections staff since at least 2003 and manager of the collections for quite a while, thought it would be a good idea to ask the Guggenheim Museum for the loan of this bleak picture (just when van Gogh had first fled Paris for the sunny south, he found it blanketed with a fresh snowfall, a bad omen) as an ornament for the president's private living quarters, but it's a safe bet it wasn't Donald's or Melania's idea. How would they even have heard of this painting's existence? What in it would have appealed to them?

You can even think she meant it as a kind of snark—that guy in the black hat is lonely, but not as lonely as Donald, the first president since Andrew Johnson not to have owned a pet (even Johnson did, according to the Whackyweedia, take up with some White House mice, white ones. but he didn't bring any animals to the residence). Or even quiet advice—get a dog, Donald! But it lacks everything valued—heat and sumptuousness—in Trump's aesthetic, other than being worth a lot of money.

Much more in line with the Trumpian aesthetic, as we know, is the counter-offer from the Guggenheim's chief curator, Nancy Spector, which has gotten a lot of publicity, an installation piece by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, America, shown in a single-stall, gender-neutral bathroom on the fifth floor from September 15 2016 to September 15 2017, and offered by the artist to the Trumps for as long as they'd like to use it: