he D.N.C. looked like the R.N.C. Apparently, during the harried month that passed between the recusal of Candidate Biden and the mounting of Candidate Harris, the campaign underwent a large image overhaul. The D.N.C. looked like the R.N.C., by which I mean, the Convention center in Chicago gave off the vapors of the Republican aesthetic. The American flag, the lodestar of the Republican look since Nixon, took over. Crowd shots on network television featured many miniature flags waving. It was not simply the ocean of flags that mattered, from the image perspective, but the multiracial lot that was holding them. One of the ways the opposition sought to discredit the Convention, which drew, it looked to the eye, substantially more people than the G.O.P. ceremonies, was to spread rumors online that the flag was not present at the center, as part of a larger claim about Democrats not being patriotic. “JUST IN: Missing from the DNC in Chicago . . . The American Flag,” one social-media post read. The attendees were able to joyfully refute this. [...]
I’ve always thought of the Parks photograph, the subdued rage in it, as an antecedent for What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, Dread Scott’s work displayed at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989, which had visitors walk across a flag, laid on the ground, to testify to their experiences of marginalization on a ledger. The piece drew the ire of President George H. W. Bush; that same year, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling protecting the “desecration of the flag” under the First Amendment. The artist helped change the flag and vice-versa. The piece is what you’re taught in school to disavow you of the idea that art is unimportant.
