They’re doing this again! I guess because it worked out so well last time?

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.

For fuck’s sake! Could it be any more blatant? Hunter Biden is not an artist any more than he was a legitimate qualified board member of Burisma. He exploited his daddy’s name to make the big bucks in that laughable “job” with Burisma and now he’s doing it all over again to sell his “art.” It’s corrupt when the disgusting Trumps do it and it’s corrupt when Hunter Biden does it. What is wrong with them?

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.

Oh shut up. Trying to manage the particulars is absurd: don’t do it at all.

What other beginning amateur “artist” gets to sell art for 500k a pop?

Biden’s art sale, expected to take place this fall, comes with potential challenges. Not only has Biden previously been accused of trading in on his father’s name, but his latest vocation is in a field where works do not have a tangible fixed value and where concerns have arisen about secretive buyers and undisclosed sums.

Plus the whole “his latest vocation” thing kind of reeks. He’s not 22, he’s 51. What conceivable reason is there to think his art is any good or worth anything at all? It looks like jumping up and down in front of an outraged world shouting “I’m doing it because I can nyah nyah nyah!”

Officials close to President Biden, who have helped craft the agreement along with Hunter Biden’s attorney, have attempted to do so in a way that allows the president’s son to pursue a new career while also adhering to the elder Biden’s pledge to reverse his predecessor’s ethical laxity, especially regarding family members.

Bullshit. Absolute flagrant bullshit. Hunter B isn’t “pursuing a new career” he is cashing in. What other 51-year-old gets to “pursue a new career” in art and sell the brand new works for inflated prices? Hunter might as well sell his underpants for 500k a pair.

But the arrangement is drawing detractors, including ethics experts as well as art critics who suggest that Hunter Biden’s art would never be priced so high if he had a different last name. Bergès has said that prices for the paintings would range from $75,000 to $500,000.

Ya think???

“The whole thing is a really bad idea,” said Richard Painter, who was chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007. “The initial reaction a lot of people are going to have is that he’s capitalizing on being the son of a president and wants people to give him a lot of money. I mean, those are awfully high prices.”

The initial reaction, and the interim reaction, and the final reaction. We’re going to have that reaction because that is what’s happening.

Hunter Biden, through his attorney Chris Clark, did not respond to an interview request for this article. When asked about the artwork — including terms of sale and potential ethics concerns — Clark referred questions to the White House.

To the White House. Which is supposed to have nothing to do with any of this, because Hunter Biden is simply selling his own art, nothing to do with Daddy at all. Fucking hell this is broken.

Andrew Bates, the deputy White House press secretary, suggested that the buyers’ confidentiality would ensure the process is ethical. “The president has established the highest ethical standards of any administration in American history, and his family’s commitment to rigorous processes like this is a prime example,” Bates said.

No. It is not.

But the officials who helped craft the agreement said that if buyers were publicly disclosed it would restrict interest, because the identities of most art purchasers are not automatically made public.

Oh it would “restrict interest” – so the officials are working for Hunter Biden. Interesting.

In Hunter Biden’s case, if a buyer’s identity does become public, White House officials probably would be warned against giving that person any preferential treatment, and could be discouraged from working with them at all, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.

And they think that’s good enough? Is this a joke?

Marc Straus, who for the past decade has owned a gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, said that among high-end art dealers, “nobody would ever start at these prices” for someone who has no professional training and has never sold art on the commercial market.

“There has to be a résumé that reasonably supports when you get that high,” Straus said. “To me, it’s pure ‘how good is it and what’s this artist’s potential, what’s the résumé?’ On that basis, it would be an entirely different price. But you give it a name like Hunter Biden, maybe they’ll get the price.”

He added, “My take was [the paintings] weren’t bad at all. But there’s a yawning gap between not bad and something fabulous.”

Others are not as kind.

Scott Indrisek, a former editor in chief of Modern Painters magazine and a former deputy editor at Artsy, said: “I would call it very much a hotel art aesthetic. It’s the most anonymous art I can imagine. It’s somewhere between a screen saver and if you just Googled ‘midcentury abstraction’ and mashed up whatever came up.”

Indrisek added, “If he wanted to be judged on his work alone, he’d show them under the name Hunter Wilson or something.”

What I’m saying. He might as well be selling the contents of his wastebasket.