Perigee

Goldsmith, Conceptualism & the Half-baked Rationalization of White Idiocy Joey De Jesus   Kenneth Goldsmith’s so-called “uncreative” editing of Michael Brown’s autopsy report into his piece, “The Body of Michael Brown,” is an appropriation of black suffering under the waving standard of “conceptualism.” Is he aware that his appropriation of black death contributes to a long and living history of racism? Probably. Still, he opens his mouth to release his vipers into the growing snakeyard of white supremacist liberalism and its literature. Though Goldsmith has committed to donate his speaker fees to Michael Brown’s family, and has asked Interrupt 3 to withhold the video and transcripts of the event, his wavering attempts to placate the public do little to restore to Michael Brown’s family any decency after commodifying Brown’s body into cultural capital while simultaneously communicating his own sense of supremacy. His apology-via-Facebook does nothing at all to reconcile the deeply racist practices upon which he has grounded his aesthetics of conceptualism. In “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Cathy Park Hong’s says, “The avant-garde’s ‘delusion of whiteness’ is the specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised... Read More