The Grove Project

Race & Art and Race as Art

Apropos of a conversation our very sophisticated wine group took up last night about race, in which both overt racism and deeper-down race fear sublimated into other parts of our lives figured prominently, the Sunday NY Times has a really well-written short history of race in the arts—and of race as itself a kind of performance art, with Barack Obama as only the most recent instantiation of the “Mythic Being”, “a performance-art version of a prevailing stereotype.”

The article has the arts as the proverbial canary, having already contemplated the “post-racial” for years now—for decades—and found it ambiguous and complex. In the article, the figure of William Pope L., the self-described “friendliest black artist in America”, crawls up Broadway in a Superman outfit on his belly, eating financial news from the paper.

Race - Art - New York Times, Holland Cotter