Fox News pundit Sean Hannity on Monday night mused on Twitter whether art-loving "leftists" would properly appreciate a YouTube video featuring a painting of President Donald Trump clutching a torn broken flag on a football field — and immediately got an art history lesson he didn't ask for.
"The 'left' loves art, and especially taxpayer funded art that is 'provocative,'" Hannity tweeted. "Let’s get their reaction to this."
Though it remains unclear whether artist John McNaughton was paid by the government to paint his "Respect the flag" ode to the president, Twitter nevertheless took the opportunity to school him both on art history and on public arts funding.
"I just want to say that Guernica has been surpassed," journalist Sam Thielman joked, referencing Pablo Picasso's 11-foot-long magnum opus.
"This is almost as good as my favorite public school mural, Visual Ode To Pisschrist," reporter Talia Lavin said, citing Andres Serrano's controversial "Piss Christ" piece that features Jesus Christ on the cross contained within a urine-filled vessel.
Veteran and photojournalist J. M. Giordano, meanwhile, took a page out of Nazi history to describe his reaction to McNaughton's imaginative take on athletes protesting police brutality.
"'Degenerate art (German: Entartete Kunst) was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe Modern art.'" he tweeted, citing a definition of the movement banned during the Third Reich. "'During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, such art was banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was un-German.'"
Check out the best reactions below: