What you name as “gummy gospel aesthetics' feels painfully accurate. Toothless had me confused initially but in the end its a perfect title; the work isn’t empty...just without consequence. We’re invited into feeling & nostalgia but never into real risk. My philosophical brain also wonders if some of these works aren’t really failing artistically so much as revealing that the institution itself is no longer capable of holding the weight we keep asking it to bear. This essay left me unsettled in the best way. I’m struck by how clearly you articulate the difference between distortion as survival & distortion as appeasement. As someone who grew up in the church but no longer believes, I keep asking myself: can Black Christianity still function as a site of revolutionary imagination, or has it become structurally incapable of that work as a liberatory framework? If the answer is no, then perhaps these shows aren’t failures, but eulogies.
This is such a huge question for all radical artists who wish to make their living from the art. What do we do with the white audiences? When are we falling from subversion into the trap of appeasement? What is the difference between inclusion and appeasement? Also for these narratives that are so deeply personal and led by the people who wrote it , how much of the defanging is coming from a personal protection (even with Happy Day, when the appearance of vulnerability is key to the effectiveness of the arc), an unconscious pulling away from true danger within a innately hostile space, which I think speaks even more to how radical can a piece be in these commercial spaces? Especially if the intent is possibility more about a personal politic than a radical one.
What you name as “gummy gospel aesthetics' feels painfully accurate. Toothless had me confused initially but in the end its a perfect title; the work isn’t empty...just without consequence. We’re invited into feeling & nostalgia but never into real risk. My philosophical brain also wonders if some of these works aren’t really failing artistically so much as revealing that the institution itself is no longer capable of holding the weight we keep asking it to bear. This essay left me unsettled in the best way. I’m struck by how clearly you articulate the difference between distortion as survival & distortion as appeasement. As someone who grew up in the church but no longer believes, I keep asking myself: can Black Christianity still function as a site of revolutionary imagination, or has it become structurally incapable of that work as a liberatory framework? If the answer is no, then perhaps these shows aren’t failures, but eulogies.
PHEW!
This is such a huge question for all radical artists who wish to make their living from the art. What do we do with the white audiences? When are we falling from subversion into the trap of appeasement? What is the difference between inclusion and appeasement? Also for these narratives that are so deeply personal and led by the people who wrote it , how much of the defanging is coming from a personal protection (even with Happy Day, when the appearance of vulnerability is key to the effectiveness of the arc), an unconscious pulling away from true danger within a innately hostile space, which I think speaks even more to how radical can a piece be in these commercial spaces? Especially if the intent is possibility more about a personal politic than a radical one.