Δευτέρα 14 Νοεμβρίου 2011
They're waiting for him at the gallery. They're lined up in the foyer,
as if for inspection. Ealan Wingate, who runs the place,
nutty-professorial in a bow tie
and blazer, stands with some gallery staffers, young women in heels and
complicated blouses, their demeanor poised and professional, their eyes
flashing OMG, OMG as the gallery doors open to let in the hard
fall wind off the Hudson and also Shawn Corey Carter, better known from
the Marcy Houses to Marrakech as Jay-Z. He's wearing Timberlands,
just-this-side-of-baggy jeans, a plain dark blue hoodie, and a look of
regal amusement. Like, For me? He shakes everybody's hand, introduces himself as "Jay."
Jay is among the first rappers to name-drop his contemporary-art
holdings in the same you-ain't-up-on-this tone that other MCs employ
when discussing their watches. He shouts out art-world superdealer Larry
Gagosian in his verse on "That's My Bitch," from Watch the Throne,
the collaborative album he and Kanye West released a few months ago. So
we're at one of Larry's places, the warehouse-sized Gagosian Gallery on
West 24th Street.
Wingate leads us into the main room, which currently houses Junction/Cycle,
two mammoth sculptures by he-man minimalist Richard Serra (who happens
to live around the corner from Jay in Tribeca). Curving walls of
rust-brown steel cut the gallery into canyons. Wingate says we're
supposed to walk through them and think about memory, so we do; it's
kind of like an existential corn maze. Jay is clearly impressed by the
sheer scale Serra's working on, but he doesn't linger. It's not until
Wingate takes us into a side room and shows us a big Cy Twombly triptych
that I see him actually stopped short by what he's looking at.
The Twombly is all scrawl and half-erasure, violent like a bus window
keyed by an army of scratch-taggers, if scratch-taggers bombed public
transit with the names of Greek heroes like AGAMEMNON and AJAX and
ODYSSEUS and JASON. Also—and once Wingate points this out to us, it's
hard to see anything else—there are a lot of exuberantly crude drawings
of vaginas and balloon-animalish dicks.
Jay digs this one. It reminds him more than a little of the Basquiats he collects, the ones he's referring to on the Throne track "Illest Motherfucker Alive" when he rhymes House like a museum with see 'em when I'm peein' with Usually, you have this much taste, you European.
(Classic Jay: culturedness as swag, class snobbery brushed off like so
much shoulder dirt, and a relatability-enhancing reference to taking a
piss just like a regular dude, all in the space of three lines.)
He stands ten feet back from the Twombly, and for a long minute nobody
says anything and the wind rattles the gallery's windows and he briefly
ceases to be the focus of everybody's attention.
"You hear that silence right there?" he finally says, laughing. "That's art workin'."
Good art doesn't always breed contemplative silence. Take Watch the Throne,
on which two grandiose motherfuckers explore the theme of
grandiose-motherfuckerdom from vastly different perspectives, stacking
dubstep on top of opera on top of Otis Redding, triumphalism on top of
sorrow on top of more triumphalism, striving for a sound as vast and
strange as the world they've come to inhabit.
It's glorious and obnoxious and pointedly self-aware, and it was more
fun to
argue about than any hip-hop record since, I don't know, Kanye West's
808s & Heartbreak or Jay-Z's widely jeered Kingdom Come.
The gist of a lot of those arguments: In an economic moment as bleak as
this, is it not sort of a dick move to drop an album—even a great
one—about what it feels like to be richer than a fifteenth-century pope?
On what turned out to be the day of a stock market crash? Even the Watch the Throne T-shirts were limited-edition Givenchy and sold for $300.
There was some backlash; when Kanye showed up at the Occupy Wall Street
protests in mid-October, he seemed almost chastened, to the extent that a
millionaire wearing a gold grill and an
I'd-rather-be-having-a-threesome expression standing mute while Russell
Simmons spoke on his behalf could
seem chastened. Whether he really had
anything to atone for is debatable.
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