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Jan. 8, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
08:06
Black Art Finally Has Its Moment
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Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
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Last month, a New York Times article caught my eye.
The headline was, Black Art Has Its Moment, Finally, along with a photo of a giant white sculpture of, well, take a look for yourself.
I was a little surprised to know that this was the moment of triumph.
But the caption of the photo removed all doubt.
It said this was a defining work of the decade.
This defining work, known as a subtlety, or the marvelous sugar baby, was dismantled five years ago.
But as you can see, it was huge.
75 feet long, 35 feet high, and covered with 160,000 pounds of sugar donated by the Domino Sugar Company.
I'm sorry I missed it.
The New York Times describes the experience that you can no longer enjoy.
In addition to the sugar baby's enlarged hands, pendulous breasts, and her narrow lioness shoulders, there is her magnificent rear, swooping up almost like a dome from a shortened spine above shortened thighs and calves.
From the back, this dome turns into a perfect heart-shaped buttocks whose cheeks protect a vulva that might almost be the entrance to a temple or cave.
A temple or cave.
Imagine the screaming about disgusting stereotypes if a white man had done this.
But because it was made by a black woman, it is a proud statement of defiance.
As the New York Times explained, it's a racist's nightmare.
Why? Because the sugar baby will never be beaten into submission.
But there was a problem.
As a black woman, Nadia Williams, complained, seeing the space filled with an overwhelmingly white majority came as a shock.
Jamila King wrote, I found it unsettling to view art by a black artist about racism in an audience that's mostly white.
An 18-year-old black girl who identified herself only as Malik T. wrote this.
There were white bodies everywhere I turned.
White bodies overflowing the space.
Waves of white people desecrating the space.
She and two friends took revenge by having their picture taken doing the Black Power salute.
That will teach those white bodies.
But let me tell you about the artist.
She is Kara Walker.
The Times says she has become a towering figure herself, an African-American visual artist who has achieved unparalleled global success.
She's known for exploring, as the Times puts it, sexual, physical, and racial exploitation.
And her depictions of slavery include, again to quote the Times, scenes of defecation, amputation, emasculation, and decapitation.
Kara Walker is best known for black, cut-out silhouettes big enough to fill a room.
It's not always clear what's going on, but there are strange doings among the figures to the right.
This is one of her installations, and it's at the Tate Modern in London.
Here is a black woman up a tree, bombarding a white man holding a black child, while a black woman cuts off his head.
Here's a heartwarming depiction of interracial friendship and reconciliation.
This is from a work called Emancipation Approximation.
A southern gentleman is sitting on a slave boy while a slave woman does his bidding.
Here's yet more interracial harmony, though just where the bellows fit in, I'm not sure.
I think this slave woman may have OD'd on interracial harmony and reconciliation.
And what's going on here?
Your guess is certainly as good as mine.
A 2010 painting by Miss Walker is described as follows by Wikipedia.
Depictions of the Ku Klux Klan accompanied by a burning cross, a naked black woman fellating a white man, and Barack Obama.
That's Barack at the podium.
Looks to me as though the white man in the foreground is getting ready to lynch the naked black man.
Well, guess where this restful scene is displayed?
In the reading room of the Newark Public Library.
Now, you might think Kara Walker does this kind of stuff because she's been terrorized by white people, but you'd be wrong.
Her father was the chairman of the art department at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.
She got bachelor's and master's degrees in the fine arts and, at age 25, was the second youngest person ever to get a Mark Arthur Foundation Genius Award.
You see, white people just love her stuff.
She has since been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, won the Larry Aldrich Award, the Deutsche Bank Prize, has a residency at the American Academy.
In Rome, is now the Chair for Visual Arts at Rutgers School of the Arts and has taught at Columbia University since 2002.
In 2007, she was one of Time Magazine's"100 Most Influential People" along with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden.
Her work is in the Guggenheim, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, Harvard's Art Museum, the Tate Gallery in London, and don't forget, the New York Times says that that giant sugar baby was a defining work of the decade.
And Ms. Walker does pretty well for herself in the art biz.
As you can see, this small, untitled work was expected to go at auction for between $200,000 and $300,000.
But if you think, That Miss Walker is pampered and privileged, you're wrong.
It's really tough being a black lady genius in white America.
Two years ago, this was how she introduced herself to people who attended her one-woman show at the fancy New York gallery, Sycamore Jenkins.
My right.
My capacity to live in this godforsaken country as a proudly raced and urgently gendered person is under threat by random groups of white male supremacist goons.
How many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology?
And Kara Walker has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.
For 14 years she was married to a German man.
Klaus Bergel.
Here they are in happier times.
They had a daughter together.
But Kara shook off Klaus in 2010.
She seems to have learned nothing, though, because Miss Walker is now reported to be in a relationship with another white man, a filmmaker named Ari Markopoulos.
As you can imagine, she can afford a vacation home just about wherever she likes, and guess where hers is?
Rural Massachusetts.
That seems like an odd choice if you're under constant threat from white male supremacist goons, but I guess her bearded boyfriend will scare them off.
Well, I think that's about enough about Kara Walker, but I'll give her the last word as follows.
I am tired.
Tired of standing up.
Being counted.
Tired of having a voice.
Or worse, being a role model.
Tired. True.
Tired of being a featured member of my racial group and or my gender niche?
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