Biden, meanwhile, doesn’t make a year-end Spotify playlist (one wonders: does he even use Spotify?). His inauguration was quiet. His Christmas decorations are not in any way notable. Perhaps his most defining fashion choice, a vestige of the image cultivated by the Onion during his VP years, is wearing aviator sunglasses, looking like a rockstar in retirement. He doesn’t generate any controversy with his decorative decisions. His most quintessential piece of Oval Office art, in my mind, is a 1917 painting he selected by Childe Hassam titled “The Avenue in the Rain.” Stars and stripes soaked in oil-painted rain — it’s easy-visualizing, a combination of impressionism and Americana. It’s also sentimental. Critic Glenn Adamson, just after Biden’s inauguration, referred to the painting’s “aesthetics of reassurance” amid our much-invoked challenging times. Who can reasonably object to a president’s choosing a painting like that? And who can really claim to find it interesting?…

This is all, in a way, to be expected. It affirms Biden’s political messaging — the back-to-normalcy he promoted during the campaign, the implicit promise that he would be a boring president you wouldn’t have to think about, and the overall return to a man in the White House who resembles a 20th-century politician more than one who’s governing in the 21st. Perhaps especially during a pandemic, the fact that there is a certain absence of culture and images from the first year of his presidency hardly comes as a shock.

Still, it marks a shift — one that ultimately might say less about Biden and his administration, and more about the kinds of cultural icons Americans want today. In a country that’s increasingly divided, as well as increasingly heterogenous, and in a media landscape that’s increasingly fragmented, who is really looking toward the president for culture? Especially toward a president who is fashioning himself, more or less, as just a president.