Picasso Baby Jay Z and Marina Abramoviㄇ Analysis
This fall, Open Space volition feature a series of reflections by artists, writers, and curators on "the contemporary." Today's slice is by Brandon Dark-brown, the editor of the series. Brandon Brown is the author of three books of poetry, near recently Flowering Mall (Roof, 2012). His art writing appears in Open up Space and Art Applied.
Jay-Z's about recent album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, was released on Independence Day of this twelvemonth. Equally an artist, Jay has e'er been obsessed with numbers and dates, and the timing of this release was not insignificant. I surmise Jay's proposition to be that Magna Carta is of the historical significance of that critical meaty betwixt the rex of England and landed aristocrats, the loving cup Jesus drank from at the Last Supper, and the annunciation of the American Revolution. I buy it.
A calendar week subsequently the album was released, he shot a video at the Pace Gallery in New York City. Explicitly inspired by the artist Marina Abramovic's long performance at the Museum of Modern Art, "The Artist Is Nowadays," the video is called Picasso Baby: A Performance Fine art Film.
In Picasso, Jay arrives at the Pace Gallery with his typical understated pomp and "aw shucks, I'chiliad a living deity" circumstance. Also a large entourage of bodyguards, protecting Jay's torso as if information technology were the Mona Lisa.Once he's settled into the room and ringed by select spectators, a track from Magna Carta Holy Grail chosen "Picasso Baby" plays over and over. Jay raps along and interacts with the crowd; certain viewers are brought into his proximity as he raps. They are virtually all celebrities, but eclectically then. The group includes idiot box stars, film producers, visual artists, art collectors, other rappers, and sundry rich society and entertainment folks. And indeed, Abramovic herself is present, stoically staring down her friend (and collector) Jay.
My attention was called to this performance, like it was possibly for many of you, by social networking. Links to texts and videos of Jay'southward performance appeared over the weekend, widely shared and commented upon, until Monday morning saw their disappearance from the commonage consciousness. Despite the hyperdilated life of a meme—a life similar a fly, hectic and brief—a lot of my friends had an occasion to sentinel, read about, and/or comment on Picasso Baby.
There was of course a lot of quick commentary generated by the rapid sharing and distribution of the link. Some were confused by the rapper'due south appropriation of "operation art" video and the gallery setting, while many others were perplexed by the very fact of Abramovic and Jay in relation to one another. Many institute the collaboration of these two artists literally ridiculous, and LOLs abounded. The general tenor of the reception ranged from a kind of bemusement to blatant hostility.
Finally, though, were the facts of this video so ridiculous or perplexing?
The paradigm of the talentless, rich collector who appropriates the genius of the relatively impoverished artist is well known. But in the song "Picasso Baby," Jay plays the function of both rich collector and artist. Moreover, the measure out of his art's success is expressed by the telescopic of his collection of artworks. "I just desire a Picasso in my casa," the song begins. A litany of modernist masters follows, from Rothko to Koons, as well as nods to the treasuries and trade shows familiar to the fine art globe: MOMA, Tate Mod, Art Basel.
"Picasso Baby" marks a transition in the terms of Jay's ain narrative. Since his debut in 1996, Jay's work has almost unerringly been well-nigh 1 set of concepts: his life as a young scissure dealer, the reinvention of himself as an artist, and the unnerving similarity of drug dealing and art-making in a backer economic system. The set of ethics and attitudes that fabricated Jay a terrific drug dealer and keep to make him a neat rapper have endured for about two decades at present. He has fabricated more than or less the finest rap music ever made, with literally millions of people effectually the world hanging on his every give-and-take. The fortune he has amassed is both the subject of his work and the outcome.
For years, Jay rapped about the luxury objects his wealth gave him the capacity to obtain: first-class cars, outstanding suits, exquisite watches. But there is no luxury object, arguably, more than luxurious than artworks—their scarcity and correlatively high price brand them bachelor but to the richest of the rich. That paintings by Picasso and Rothko take supplanted the Maybachs and Rolexes as indices of Jay's grandeur show that the stakes of his celebrity have been raised.
But Jay is not merely a rich collector of artwork—the reason, subsequently all, he tin can beget such luxury objects is premised upon his own accomplishments every bit a working artist. Significantly, the i artist he doesn't collect in "Picasso Baby," simply instead identifies with, is Jean-Michel Basquiat. Jay'southward appropriation of Basquiat is circuitous. For ane matter, Basquiat, like Jay, is a quintessential New York City creative person, who emerged in a downtown scene that very much included early hip hop culture—from Basquiat's good friend Fab Five Freddy to the painter's graffiti works.
Basquiat's work is also oft about race, and in that location is an uneasiness in Basquiat about the appearance of rich (mostly white) collectors flocking to purchase his paintings. The millions he made from painting were not put to "good (backer) use." That money was spent on suits, given to his friends, and used to purchase heroin. Basquiat's art, unlike Jay's, was not centrally concerned with worshipping money. And yet Jay's citation of Basquiat emphasizes his peculiar place in the collector/maker economy, cohering warily in his image.
Hove takes the subway in a Jean-Michel Basquiat T-shirt
Simply if we're talking almost a systematic, unabashed, and ornamental song of praise to majuscule for its own sake, rap music is the merely form of art that could possible compete with the visual art world. And that's why I didn't discover the collaboration betwixt Abramovic and Jay-Z, or Jay'due south appropriation of the gallery every bit a setting for his work, awfully surprising. And still my social network was widely bemused.
Perhaps Picasso illuminates the fact that one of the foundational myths of postmodernity, the so-called "high/low" collapse, has perhaps not collapsed as much as nosotros suppose. The tradition of postmodern art that easily assimilates popwork into its composition simultaneously asserts divergence. That is, the art globe apprehends popwork both "from higher up" (because the artwork is supposedly more sophisticated than the popwork) and "from beneath" (because the popwork is generative of massive commercial attending and capital, while the artwork is attended to by relatively few). This narrative, which assumes the transcendent sophistication of the artwork, very carefully conceals what is almost always the instance for fine art in galleries and museums: that they are destined to end up the possession of someone very rich. In fact, this is as much what they are for equally annihilation else.
Everybody knows this, of grade. The invisible compact between the artists and the patrons of the arts has hardly changed from the classic paradigm I mention above. In other words, collectors of art notwithstanding enjoy the enigmatic and eccentric charisma of artists and aspire to buy both their products too every bit their sociability (on "Tom Ford," Jay raps, "I party with weirdos").
What do the artists get? They go the money from the rich collector of form. It can even be the instance that the artists themselves, as a result, get rich. Not typically as rich as the collectors, only rich by any standard. And those riches in turn have the power to make up one's mind the procedure of art-making. Information technology would exist difficult, for case, to rigorously differentiate millionaire Jeff Koons paying artisans to build giant balloon dogs, which he will so sell, from any other capitalist.
Part of the product the art world sells is the thought that there is something different virtually Koons. The fine art market sells the idea that the artist's piece of work partakes of a magic power which significantly affects its value—and part of that magic power has to do with the intangible features of what we imagine an artist to be: charismatic, eccentric, etc.
Jay-Z does non endure from this delusion. Call up, Jay went to Zucotti Park not to suddenly develop a critique of wealth inequality, but to scout for marketing opportunities. He makes no apology for his capitalist realism or the quantifiable greatness of his charisma. In fact he banks on information technology. The signal, peradventure, is that this isn't rare. What "shocked" my social network was the pulling back of the drape on a quite commonplace scenario. P.South. the "wizard" is money!
Picasso Baby Jay Z and Marina Abramoviㄇ Analysis
Source: https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2013/10/on-the-contemporary-jay-zs-picasso-baby-a-performance-art-film/