Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd fame, kicked off his 2017 US tour in Kansas City on Friday night and this was the backdrop. Some concert attendee reportedly walked out. Though considering it’s Pink Floyd, I don’t think a “pig” reference is out of place. Here’s more info about the Trump-inspired performance during the tour. (via Union Thugs’ FB page)

If you have not heard of the Met Gala, do not worry. You were not invited. Since 1995, on the first Monday of every May, the Metropolitan has handed its keys over to Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine and the artistic director of Condé Nast. Here her purported aim has been to raise funds for the museum’s Costume Institute—I’m sorry, make that the “Anna Wintour Costume Center.” Her lording over the gala’s invite list has become notorious and the subject of a documentary called The First Monday in May.

Of course, the potential conflicts of interest that exist between Wintour’s commercial concerns and her museum trusteeship are blatant. The specter that she has conjured up with her gala has followed priorities far beyond fundraising and certainly beyond the realm of art. Along the way these extra-artistic interests have risen up from the Institute’s basement galleries to infect not only the museum’s spaces but also its institutional tenor, and by extension the tenor of American museums at large.

But this is more than a story of a mutually beneficial friendship between an artist and a curator. It’s a story of the revision of a racially unbalanced Western canon, which caught up with Hendricks just in time. In 2008, when Kehinde Wiley’s heraldic but naturalistic portraits of black people were gathering wide acclaim, a much different art world than Hendricks faced in his youth began to turn him into a retroactive icon.

“Some of the younger artists, who were then in their thirties, like Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas, who speak so eloquently about his impact on their work, were starting to get a lot of attention, critically and in the market,” Schoonmaker said. “They made an easy reference point for him. The younger generation of African-American artists working with representation really opened the door for people to rediscover Barkley’s work.”

Chile’s pavilion featured an installation of more than 1,000 Mapuche kollong ritual masks; these were made by 40 Mapuche artists identified only as part of a “group of Indigenous inhabitants of southcentral Chile and southwestern Argentina” in the press release. The masks were part of the wider installation Werken (2017), orchestrated by and credited to artist Bernardo Oyarzun; the show also includes an LED display scrolling some 6,900 surviving Mapuche names around the exhibition space.

Though Oyarzun has identified himself as being of some Mapuchean ancestry in a few prior interviews, his relationship to this culture is not grounded in or indicated in the pavilion’s press release or curatorial framework. As a result, the Mapuche’s general corporeal (or documentation-credited) absence here counters the critique of Werken’s intended presence.

More troubling yet was Brazilian Ernesto Neto’s Um Sagrado Lugar (Sacred Place) in the “Viva Arte Viva” section identified by Macel as the “Pavilion of Shamans.” Neto’s motivations are unclear—except for the space he creates as a ringleader, choreographing spectacle and the fetishization of primitivism by placing six Txanas, all members of the Huni Kuin people, on display as his art under a tent.

The Goethe-Institut-supported talk around Um Sagrado Lugar (Sacred Place), held during the opening events on May 12, was divided. The Huni Kuins’ translated words spoke to the urgency and responsibility we have to the natural world. Neto, whose presence evoked the cult leader of the mission in the 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent, rambled between artspeak, capitalist patter and hobby ethnography. He proclaimed, “This work is for sale,” indicating 40 per cent of the sale would go to the gallery/dealer, 40 per cent to the artist, and 20 per cent to the Huni Kuin. Any true sense or sign of collaboration in this work was trumped by Neto’s self-serving arrogance, and by the lingering colonial gestures he perpetuated.

Perhaps this is why she clung firmly to the painterliness of her paintings. Their compositions may sometimes be influenced by her design work, but their surfaces rarely are. Patches of colour are almost never flat or evened out in her paintings, brushstrokes are visible, sometimes pencil too, and planes are liable to fade and blend in and out of each other. The useful comparison may be with Matisse, whose work she knew well (not least from the second post-impressionist exhibition). Matisse didn’t disguise his brushstrokes either, and like Bell’s many of his paintings have an illustrative, colouring-in quality, but he was less likely to dilute his paints, so that each area stands out strongly, and he used them more graphically, giving each part of a picture its own character. Bell’s brushstrokes are smaller, the effect more uniform, creating a surface texture that ripples across a canvas. She would thin her pigments too, so that even within an area of single colour, like the background of Still Life with Wild Flowers, there are lots of different tones and a good deal of patchy variation and striation.

The child who became the most powerful man in the world, or at least occupied the real estate occupied by a series of those men, had run a family business and then starred in an unreality show based on the fiction that he was a stately emperor of enterprise, rather than a buffoon barging along anyhow, and each was a hall of mirrors made to flatter his sense of self, the self that was his one edifice he kept raising higher and higher and never abandoned.

I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures.

  • An Eminem song from 2000 — “Stan” — is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. The noun definition reads:

An overzealous or obsessive fan of a particular celebrity.

RELATED: Merriam-Webster adds their two cents:

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

Hrag Vartanian is editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic.