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What is supremely profitable today is contemporary art. How profitable? In 2019, a work called Rabbit by the artist Jeff Koons sold at auction for $91 million, setting a new record for a living artist. Walker’s work fetches hefty sums too. Yet aesthetically, and more importantly, ethically, I think they are radically and diametrically opposed. Still, they are worth pondering together, Walker’s Subtlety and Koon’s Rabbit. Because they stand before us like signs at a fork in the road, indicating the options ahead. Both are signatures of contemporary Americana. Neither could have been produced anywhere other than in the USA. Both express in remarkably accurate terms an ugliness unique to our culture. Walker’s art tells us more than we want to hear about the ugliness of our past. Koons’s silver bunny shows us the ugliness of our present, and—if we do nothing to alter its course—the ugly emptiness of our future. By polishing away any possible connection to the past, and glibly seeking succor in false innocence and false universality, Koons has produced perhaps the whitest art, ideologically not ethnically, ever created. Even the white bourgeoisie no longer find its shock value palatable. In a scathing review some years ago, Jed Perl called a Koons retrospective “a multimillion-dollar mausoleum in which everything that was ever lively and challenging about avant-gardism and Dada and Duchamp has gone to die.” There is no real laughter, no genuine embarrassment to be had in the presence of a Koons. Irritation, indifference, transient fascination, titillation? Maybe—but never embarrassment. How could you be embarrassed? Koons, not unlike Donald Trump, is a pure pure troll: one who sees that in a society obsessed with shaming the ultimate sign of freedom, superiority, and success is shamelessness tout court, and it sells itself. It is the triumph of pure appearance—the art and politics of a deathless, lifeless, narrative-free future.
A decisive turning point came when literary critic Barbara Johnson arrived from Yale to teach a course called Deconstruction, and he first read Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Ferdinand Saussure. At the time, in a class on James Joyce, he was also reading Ulysses. “It had a rhythm I was totally familiar with, but that I didn’t associate with high art. I believed, I just sensed that it was radical; it felt instinctively to me like this was against the status quo, that the reason they wrote this way was that it was like a secret, it wasn’t for the bosses.” He felt the same way about Derrida: “This is for the people who want to tear shit up. And we were ready for it.”
In his criticism, Moten is especially attuned to a zone that Brent Edwards (a close friend and interlocuter) has called the “fringe of contact between music and language.” He’ll draw the reader’s attention to the “surplus lyricism of the muted, mutating horns of Tricky Sam Nanton or Cootie Williams” in Duke Ellington’s band, for example. Or, commenting on Invisible Man’s observation that few really listen to Louis Armstrong’s jazz, he’ll cut to an abrupt and unsettling assertion: “Ellison knows that you can’t really listen to this music. He knows . . . that really listening, when it goes bone-deep into the sudden ark of bones, is something other than itself. It doesn’t alternate with but is seeing; it’s the sense that it excludes; it’s the ensemble of the senses. Few really read this novel.”
oooh
What can one learn from the expression of people who refuse to be commodities, but also once were commodities? What does history look like, or the present, or the future, from the point of view of those who refuse the norms produced by systems of violence, who consent not to be a single being? These key concerns course through the entirety of Moten’s dazzling new trilogy, which assembles all his theoretical writings since In the Break. At a time of surging reactionary politics, ill feeling, and bad community, few thinkers seem so unburdened and unbeholden, so confident in their reading of the historical moment. Indeed, when faced with the inevitable question of the state of US politics, Moten remains unfazed. “The thing I can’t stand is the Trump exceptionalism. Remember when Goldwater was embarrassing. And Reagan. And Bush. Trump is nothing new. This is what empire on the decline looks like. When each emperor is worse than the last.”
It’s like a jungle sometimes . . . He is the savage. He is beastmode, paradoxically subliterate and over-articulate, overspeaking and overlaying official thinking and bien-pensant consideration, hyperfleshed and hypersexed, his self-flagellation and his private inferno conducted in public, like a hacked account spewing up a volcanic, heroic, and unrepentant excess of verb, of notation, of expression, of style without effort, of study without academy, of access without permission, of authority without authorship, of tradition without history, of art without museum, of a past beyond recollection, for a future within no future, and without a plan to get there.
i dont know enough about basquiat to assess this but i like the musicality of it
These are lines from a lyric known as “Fragment 47” composed by the poet Sappho who lived in the late seventh century BC at Mytilene, the largest city on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea. In the poet Anne Carson’s translation, this is how it reads:
Eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees
Two thousand six hundred years later, this line is still fresh. Even if we translated Eros not as a god but, more secularly, with the eros translatable to our familiar word “love,” there is still something decisively original in it. What makes Sappho’s lyric so striking? What she is describing is so common that the clichés of “falling in love” or “love at first sight” are automatic to us. Yet the lines above sound nothing like a Hallmark card. They have a definite point of view, but they are entirely free of didacticism. There is no judgment from on high; this is not a maxim intended to impress us with the poet’s wit or insight. Sappho is not speaking to a collectively culled piece of accepted wisdom. She is not idealizing a high sentiment nor satirizing a human weakness. Instead, she concentrates entirely on the roiling life of her own subjectivity. Her language draws upon and pulls into itself the imaginative resources of empirical observation, what William Carlos Williams called “the imaginative qualities of actual things.” The power of language to mirror the physical world is transfigured by inverting its location and reflecting it back to us as an interior landscape.
This density is what makes poetry a literature, which is to say it cannot exist without roots, without knowledge of earlier bodies of poetic expression. This is why when “Instapoetry” proudly declares itself a form of unknowing, it denies itself the power of the thing it claims to be. When the Instagram poet Charly Cox, for instance, writes of the history of poetry that “I didn’t know a thing,” but that it doesn’t matter because “I just knew how to feel,” the hollowness and, yes, the narcissism are distressingly naïve. Every poet from Sappho to Simone White has known that getting feeling into language isn’t the same thing as having feelings.
Hip-hop is an adolescent genre of music. Between the lines you can plainly see attempts to tackle critical issues: social inequality, sex, religion, mortality, boredom, fear. But, ungainly and awkward, it indulges in the most ridiculous immaturity. Still, the stupidity of adolescence is not without its rush, its exhilaration. Freshness has its place. The music of our youth is tinged with a special effervescence. It is imbued with meanings we can only barely articulate, colored with feelings couched in half-remembered conversations, in old friends and half-forgotten crushes, stored amid all the whirring dynamos of the unconscious. Maybe this is why on a personal level French hip-hop is so easy for me to forgive, even though it still has a kind of embarrassing stigma. French hip-hop? Really? Well, yes. I actually can’t listen to JoeyStarr shouting out, “Saint-Denis Funk Funky-Fresh!” without cracking a huge smile. Saint-Denis, c’est de la bombe bébé!
[...] To think about blackness as a kind of categorical imperative, a duty first to ourselves and therefore to all, to expand the reach of freedom from domination, to understand blackness as a way of being in the world that necessitates a political project, that orients our expression inevitably toward a confrontation with injustice. It is also to understand that Black Humanism, with black music at its core, is the foundation that has cracked open a hollow American democracy by force and continuous resistance, and that remembering and carrying on the burden of that struggle continues to be the only hope for making this country a place worth living in, a nation with something to offer other than the cold hand of business ruling over a glass-tower gentry, a pauperized and fearful suburban petty bourgeoisie, and underneath both the abyss of the carceral archipelago.
In this literature, “antiblackness” is a technical, not a subjective or impressionistic, term. It does not refer to prejudice or dislike, as might easily be supposed. Rather, it is used to capture the idea that an underlying racial antagonism can come to structure the social fabric of a given society. Race, in this description, operates like a function that overdetermines outcomes and relations between people regardless of any particular actor’s personal disposition or attitudes. It says that there are disparate and antagonistic sets of what Durkheim would call “social facts,” matters of objective analysis about the relative position of power, and more importantly even, of value, that inhere in populations that are racially marked and bounded. The racial fault line is therefore not a regrettable byproduct of behaviors that can be reformed or improved over time; it is not like a tumor that can be excised from the body politic. On the contrary, it is a necessary and even vital ingredient of the social order, a division that pulls two socially defined groups apart but simultaneously binds the larger edifice of society together like mortar in between bricks, holding them in place. Let us call this the “structural antagonism thesis.”