ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Economy
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1654700
The Price of Power: A Public Choice Approach to Hunter Biden's Art Sales*
Provisionally accepted
- Columbus State University, Columbus, United States
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Abstract. This study examines the market for Hunter Biden's art, with an eye toward the art's value as a rent seeking device that benefitted Hunter and the wider Biden family. More specifically, this study asserts that the usefulness of Hunter Biden's art sales as a rent-or transfer-seeking tool can be established in any one of three ways. First, Hunter Biden's paintings have not generally been judged positively. In fact, the quality of his artwork has been widely panned by esteemed art critics from around the globe, particularly in relation to transaction prices. Second, although information on the buyers of Hunter Biden's art has, by design, been secreted from the public, one of the two known buyers received a prestigious presidential appointment from then-U.S. President Joseph Biden shortly after making a purchase, clearly giving the sale a privilege seeking appearance. Third, although data on Hunter Biden's art sales are relatively scant, some quantitative evidence is provided in this study indicating that sale prices of the art and U.S. President Joseph Biden's monthly approval ratings are positively and significantly correlated, a result that is consistent with the public choice theory of rent seeking.
Keywords: Cultural economics, Public choice, Rent seeking, Lobbying, political economy
Received: 26 Jun 2025; Accepted: 13 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mixon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Franklin G Mixon, mixon_franklin@columbusstate.edu
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