In 2014, Matt Saunders traveled to Dallas to see “The Art of Leadership: A President’s Personal Diplomacy” at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, an exhibition of paintings by the former president. He puzzled over the works in a column published in Artforum’s Summer 2014 issue: “The ex-president defines himself as a painter, but do we define him as an artist?”
 
This week, Artforum revisits the essay alongside its contemporary follow-up: In a new column for the magazine’s website, Saunders returns to the subject of politicians turned artists with his essay “Jimmy Carter and the Problem of Celebrity Painting,” meditating on Carter’s turn to “Sunday painting” and the value of the works he produced in the wake of the sale of four such paintings at Christie’s for more than $500,000. 

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan