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| "Dozer casse la merde chez Le Sacre Coeur" - a collaboration between Braque and myself, inspired by Schnabel |
If I were to invite Julian Schnabel over to my house to
watch me break all of the dishes and then arrange them into a cubist-inspired
(I’m a Braque fan, I can’t help it) rendering of my cat, would it be art? What
if I revived Andy Warhol from the dead to help me make sidewalk chalk
Campbell’s soup cans in the driveway? Maybe it would be art, but it wouldn’t be
good art. I’m concerned by the buzz about the so-called “performance art”
coming from Jay Z.
First of
all, didn’t he retire? I mean, clearly, that was a joke, and we all knew it. Or
maybe it was a publicity stunt. Whatever it was, I would have preferred that to
the self-aggrandizement bubbling out of the creation of the music video for
Picasso Baby. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a total rip off of Marina
Abramovic’s performance art work The Artist Is Present. He’s calling it a
“Performance Art Film.” Marina Abramovic even made an appearance! What Jay Z
does in this film is rap, up close and personal, with various people dancing,
sitting, or standing in front of him. Is this performance? Yes. Is this
Performance Art? I don’t think so.
Maybe I’m
splitting hairs. Yes, music is an art form. And as musicians, we perform. As a
musician, however, I have a hard time swallowing the idea that someone having a
good time giving a concert and engaging his audience is creating “performance
art.” The former term invokes something more daring, line crossing, and visual.
I think of the sorts of things that might make me really uncomfortable, like
people covered in poop and throwing themselves at walls. Or something less
gross but that might make you wonder about something, such as Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass box.
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Jay Z
taking a rap video and calling it performance art is a summation of everything
that’s wrong with culture in America. People want their culture handed to them
in a Styrofoam Big Mac box. They want to open it up, eat the garbage inside,
and then chuck the rest in the trash and never think about it again. They want
it to taste good, be ready fast, and they don’t care if it has no nutritional
value. If you want evidence of this, all you have to do is walk into a big name
bookstore and take a look at what they have out on the front tables. When was
the last time you saw Proust on a center table? I don’t want to read it either,
but I also as a general rule avoid anything I see on the tables in the middle
of the bookstore and refuse to purchase or read any book that has a pink cover.
The radio
is filled with crap. You know that as well as I do. Selena Gomez, Justin
Blubber, people whose names I haven’t even heard of that probably had shows on
the Disney Channel, or Nickelodeon, or were illegitimate children of the
characters of Degrassi: The Next Generation. Mediocrity is more infectious than
MRSA and adults still don’t know how to buy shoes that fit (I realize that has
absolutely nothing to do with the topic, but it is irritating me to the point of
irrational anger, lately. Just look down a minute and take a look at all of those feet hanging off of sandals and ill placed arches. It defies logic).
There’s an
editorial on npr.org about the Jay Z music video (Stubborn like a mule I am, I'm not calling it a performance art video).
The author, Cedric Shine, claims in the title that the big money mogul is
putting hip-hop and art back in the same room. They were never in the same room.
The author would know that if he read his own words. In the first two
paragraphs he describes Jay Z’s marketing – a Samsung ad announcing the title
of the ad during the NBA finals, and then how the recording industry adjusted
their policies so that Samsung could buy a million copies of the album before
it even dropped. The next paragraph champions Jay Z’s thoughts on how he’s
bringing more revenue to a “dying music industry model.” What Cedric Shine has
just described is commercialism – not art.
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