Low End Theory
'Free'
In Grant Morrison’s 1989 graphic novel “Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, the psychotherapist Ruth Adams muses on the Joker: “It’s quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here.” Later in the story, Dr. Arkham, founder of the Arkham Asylum, devours his wife and daughter after their brutal murder at the hands of an escaped asylum patient. He thinks to himself: “It all seems perfectly rational. Perfectly, perfectly rational.”
Morrison published “Serious House” because he wanted to kill Batman. Specifically, he wanted to kill the then-latest incarnation of the character, popularized by Frank Miller in the mid-1980s. Miller wrote Batman as a grizzled, violent, Freudian Vietnam vet, an iron-fisted punisher and pummeler of black and brown drug dealers and trannie hookers, the vengeful soul of ’80s white America, the defender of order and sanity in a cataclysmic age.
I Love Every Person's Insides
The trans electronic pop star SOPHIE only recently gained physical form.
Since 2013, she has made her name as an affiliate of the label and collective PC Music, a London-based group of electronic producers and vocalists. For most of her career, SOPHIE was ferociously anonymous. Her face, name, past, and identity remained hidden. But in 2017, she materialized, and since then her art has begged to be understood in the context of her now public transness.
Look, a Negro!
What does it mean to look at Kara Walker?
Since her first mural in 1994, this Negress has captured the minds, hearts, and genitals of her fellow Negroes, plastering them on the walls of the National Gallery of Art, MoMA, the Whitney, and countless galleries and institutions across the Nation. Auntie Walker’s murals are populated by silhouettes of what we are told are Black bodies. We are also told that they are Black bodies in anguish, suffering under the yoke of American oppression.
A Seat at the Table
In 2009, the year after Beyonce Knowles released “Single Ladies,” Kanye West stormed the Video Music Awards stage. Taylor Swift had just won Best Female Video for “You Belong With Me” when West grabbed the microphone from Swift and yelled, “Beyonce has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!” This infamous story is the starting point for an important inquiry into the intersection of Blackness and art. Kanye made a normative claim about Beyonce’s work. He did not say that Taylor Swift won because she is white, or that Beyonce lost because she is Black. These claims, indeed true, were certainly implied by his outburst. But what he said was that “Beyonce has one of the best videos of all time.” What he said was that Beyonce’s art was good, was better, was the best.
Does Beyonce make good art? In the history of the Grammy Awards, a hip-hop album has only won twice. In fact, a Black woman has not been awarded the prestigious Album of the Year prize since 1999, when Lauryn Hill won for “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” And worse, this most prestigious honor has been awarded to only 12 albums made by Black artists over the course of its 60-year existence.