Bailey on Gopnik on Barclay
Just back from an exhausting but successful weekend art fair and just in time to catch another great episode of Deadwood. Have a few hundred emails and ten days of the WaPo and others to catch up on.
And leave it to Bailey to help me out with my lack of recent posting and give us some good reading and excellent discussion points as he responds to Blake Gopnik's piece on Christian Marclay's video work (filed all the way from London).
"How About an Art Exhibit Inspired by an Art Critic Who’s Dragged Behind a Pickup Truck in Texas?"
By J.W. BaileyOne of the emblems of postmodern art is its insulated obsession with distilling unimaginable human tragedy down to a clever relativist art trick that is appropriate for display in the sanitized environment of the white cube space – and the larger the scale of the tragedy, the more the art trick seems to revolve around the distorted use of multi-media to convey the horrors of the deaths of the usually nameless and faceless victims that are symbolized through the art.
In his review of Christian Marclay’s seminal postmodern work, "Guitar Drag", Blake Gopnik takes the trouble to inform us that the video of the guitar being dragged behind a pickup truck for 14 minutes along a rural road echoes the death of James Byrd, Jr., at the hands of vicious racists in Texas (mind you that Gopnik doesn’t actually mention the vicious racists part, though).
Gopnik, a refined genteel member of the Washington, D.C., art elite, and a person we can safely assume has never spent more than three seconds riding in the back bed of a pickup truck in Texas with a perverted gang of drunken good ole’ boy racist rednecks looking for trouble, let alone ever being dragged behind that pickup as an African-American victim of their sick and monstrous joyride, tells us that watching Marclay’s stirring musical piece made him feel the pain of James Byrd, Jr.
Article comments
1 - amintha l x
this shit should never had happened in the frist place. where is the police when we need them. this is only the begin for us black people. we won't reparation now, for all our anestor had gone in the past until, now....
2 - jean r x
sean hannity and mark livine and rush lambragh never talk about these horrible cases, but tends to attack president barack obama, because they fear to take order from a blackman. go barack obama.
3 - al bey
how long should black people take these kind of treatment and is it going to stop, now or forever?
4 - william wright
it is time for all black people to work together and stop let religion divide us up.
5 - ron eli
we need to love everyone, but not nonsense.
6 - Jet
As I've said before, when a people feel oppressed, they invoke that God is on their side, hoping to scare their oppressors into thinking "What if they're right?"