Four years ago at Slot, Charles Cooper and Pia Larsen staged an exhibition of flags to coincide with the USA presidential election that were playful. When they proposed a follow up show a few months ago, their mood was anything but playful and everything to do with the current presidency.

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In Donald Trump’s self-declared era of ‘fake news’, the nuanced art of spin was replaced with narcissistic lies. A cant, dictated by Rupert Murdoch and emblazoned with the idiotic catch cry, “Make America Great Again”, begs the question, when did America stop being great? 

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Cooper with his coffin and Larsen with her banners identify the two glaring issues facing the USA at this election, an inability to remedy or manage the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial and economic inequalities epitomised by the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protest movement. 

Together they ask a deeper question, are we watching the paragon of capitalism devolve into tacit civil war?

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Tony Twigg