The Smithsonian's portrait of President Obama pic.twitter.com/buvVAEomrj — Axios (@axios) February 12, 2018 
 
 Artist Kehinde Wiley's bold portrait of Barack Obama has been well received, with The Boston Globe calling the painting and its pair, Amy Sherald's portrait of Michelle Obama, "socio-cultural documents to surviving with grace and elegance." But none has been quite as insane as the one Sean Hannity promoted on his Twitter account Tuesday afternoon. “Obama's portrait—a stark contrast to predecessors with inappropriate sexual innuendo,” the Fox News host tweeted, linking to a truly bizarre article on his website written by “Hannity Staff.” 
 
 “PORTRAIT PERVERSION: Obama Portrait Features ‘SECRET SPERM,’ Artist Joked About ‘Killing Whitey’” the headline screamed. Hannity got one thing right, anyway: It is nontraditional. !” That post just happened to include the same close up of Obama that Hannity used on his site. UPDATE: In a statement provided by Fox News, Hannity told The Daily Beast: “Earlier today my web staff posted content that was not reviewed by me before publication. "It does not reflect my voice and message and, therefore, I had it taken down."
– People have thoughts about the new Obama portraits, and some are weirder than others. On Tuesday, Sean Hannity's website pushed perhaps the weirdest of all—that the portrait contained hidden images of sperm. The Week quotes from the since-deleted page: "Controversy surrounding Kehinde Wiley's wildly non-traditional portrait of the commander-in-chief broke out within minutes of its unveiling, with industry insiders claiming the artist secretly inserted his trademark technique—concealing images of sperm within his paintings." And a since-deleted Hannity tweet read, "Obama's portrait - a stark contrast to predecessors with inappropriate sexual innuendo," per Newsweek. The allegation drew quite a bit of attention, and apparently Hannity himself was surprised. "Earlier today my web staff posted content that was not reviewed by me before publication," he said in a statement. "It does not reflect my voice and message and, therefore, I had it taken down." The sperm rumor apparently began circulating on 4chan, and the Daily Beast appears to have tracked down the original source, a 2008 article in the New York Times about artist Wiley. That article says his portraits “initially depicted African-American men against rich textile or wallpaper backgrounds whose patterns he has likened to abstractions of sperm.” This tweet shows the image making the sperm-conspiracy rounds.