Source: Breitbart
Hunter Biden’s connections to the New York art scene reportedly go through lingerie entrepreneur Zoe Kestan, otherwise known as @weed_slut_420 on Instagram.
President Joe Biden’s 51-year-old scandal-plagued son is venturing into the art world, with Soho art dealer Georges Bergès, who reportedly has some ties to China, holding a private viewing for Hunter’s artwork in Los Angeles, followed by an art exhibition in New York in the fall. Hunter has reportedly been working on his art full time, and his pieces, Bergès told Artnet, will “range from $75,000 for works on paper to $500,000 for large-scale paintings.”
Hunter’s gateway into the art world appears to be connected to Zoe Kestan, “the lingerie entrepreneur who is better known by her Instagram handle @weed_slut_420,” as Artnet reported last year:
For a period in 2018, Biden could be seen stopping by art openings and parties on the Lower East Side, and attended a runway show for the hip downtown fashion brand Lou Dallas. Sources said that many of his art-world connections came through his relationship with Zoe Kestan, the lingerie entrepreneur who is better known by her Instagram handle @weed_slut_420. In addition to modeling her wares on her account, where she has nearly 75,000 followers, Kestan is also an artist whose Polaroid snapshots have appeared in group shows with Bernadette Van-Huy, Danny McDonald, and Sam Pulitzer. She has also appeared on the controversial podcast Red Scare, hosted by art critic Anna Khachiyan and actress Dasha Nekrasova, and modeled in runway shows during London Fashion Week. (Reps for Kestan and Biden didn’t get back to us.)
There’s also some concrete leftover evidence of Hunter’s brief wade into the water of downtown art studios and gallery openings. Sources say that, being circulated around the downtown gallery hub of Dimes Square like samizdat, are images of oil paintings of Hunter Biden—that is, images of paintings of all of Biden with nothing left to the imagination—made by another local artist who has asked dealers to not reveal her identity. We’ve yet to get a hold of the depictions of Hunter in the buff or a lead on that painter’s identity, but rest assured: we will keep you posted.
However, Hunter’s new venture has sparked growing concerns about the potential for pay-for-play corruption in light of the fact that the buyers will remain anonymous, and the shadowy nature of the art world is a notorious avenue for money laundering. Last year, a bipartisan report by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that “secrecy, anonymity, and a lack of regulation create an environment ripe for laundering money and evading sanctions” in the art world.
“Given the intrinsic secrecy of the art industry, it is clear that change is needed in this multi-billion dollar industry,” the report determined.
Hunter Biden’s past money-making ventures — specifically his international business dealings with Ukraine and China at a time when his then-vice president father was the point-person for U.S. foreign policy with those countries — furthers these concerns, according to Breitbart News senior contributor and Profiles in Corruption author Peter Schweizer.
“Hunter Biden was repeatedly hired and given deals by foreign entities that he was clearly not qualified for in the hopes of getting favors from his father,” Schweizer, president of Government Accountability Institute (GAI), told Breitbart News. “It is not a stretch to believe that foreign entities will pay for or commission his works of art at inflated prices to do the same.”
As with every artist, sales are always confidential to protect the privacy of the collector,” the Townsend Group, an agency representing Bergès, told Fox Business.
“Pricing fine art in his experiences as a Gallerist is based on the demand of the work as well and the intrinsic value of it,” the statement continued. “His feeling is that within each piece – as with every artist, sales are always confidential to protect the privacy of the collector, this is standard practice for transactions in galleries as well as auction houses.”
Adding to that is the suspicion by some that Hunter’s art will be sold at inflated prices merely because of his name.
Acevedo told the New York Post: “Anybody who buys it would be guaranteed instant profit.”
“He’s the president’s son. Everybody would want a piece of that. The provenance is impeccable,” he added, noting Hunter’s pieces would typically sell in the $25,000 to $100,000 range.
Art consultant Martin Galindo also told the Post that he expects Hunter’s work to do “well in the market because this industry is very much about, what’s a simple way to put this — it’s like clout.”
The suspicion of Hunter using his family name for power and influence spans years, as detailed by Breitbart News:
One of the most well-known examples of this centers around Hunter’s involvement on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian oligarch-owned oil and gas company, which paid him tens of thousands of dollars per month despite his lack of experience in the energy sector or Ukraine in general. At the time, Hunter’s then-vice president father was the point-person negotiating U.S. policy with Ukraine. After leaving office, Joe Biden later bragged about how he threatened to withhold U.S. assistance to Ukraine unless Ukrainian officials fired a prosecutor who had launched a corruption investigation into the company that had hired Hunter.
Hunter also came under criticism for his lucrative business dealings with state-owned entities in China, as Breitbart News senior contributor and Secret Empires author Peter Schweizer has reported in detail.
“In China, [Hunter] travels with his father in December [2013] aboard Air Force Two. While his father is meeting with Chinese officials, Hunter Biden is doing we don’t know what. But the evidence becomes clear because ten days after they return to Washington, his small boutique investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, gets a $1 billion deal,” Schweizer explained during a 2019 appearance with Sean Hannity.
“That’s $1 billion with a ‘B,’ later expanded to $1.5 billion. And that deal is with the Chinese government,” he emphasized. “It’s a deal that nobody else has in China. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, nobody.”
Hunter told Artnet that painting, for him, is about bringing forth “the universal truth.”
Earlier this month, Hunter came under fire after text messages revealed he used the n-word multiple times in conversations with his white attorney. However, such conversations could give a glimpse into Hunter’s supposed search for universal truth, as he asked his attorney, George Mesires, where to find “unconditional love.” Mesires mentioned God, Hunter’s late-brother Beau, and Hunter’s children, but Hunter responded sharply, calling Mesires the n-word and dismissing God as “just a fictional character from the imagination of the collective frightened” before joking about his penis.
