Idolator

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama made a campaign stop at a Virginia art gallery the other night, but before any cameras rolled, he requested that a painting depicting a recent pop-cultural milestone Abe covered up:

The one that was covered was a 6-by-10-foot oil reproduction of a widely circulated pop culture photo showing pop star Britney Spears, sans underpants, getting out of a car, with Paris Hilton in the driver's seat. The Boling piece blurs the nudity.

"I wished we could have had a good dialog about freedom of speech," Boling said, but added, "I understand that a politician would want to avoid being photographed in front of Britney Spears' crotch."

There are about eight layers of irony in this whole scenario, the most obvious one being that this guy, while sighing about the lost opportunity for dialogue, was probably calculating how value of his tracing work was spiking by about five kajillion percent.

A photo of the painting of the photo is after the jump (via The Smoking Gun), and it's NSFW, unless you W at TMZ:

Art Critic Obama [The Smoking Gun]
Art and politics collide at event [InRich.com, via Fresh Intelligence]