The Problem with Consistency
By Seph Rodney / Issue 1 / November 14, 2024
Adam, who, at this point in the plot, hopes to convince Helene to become his sous chef, interviews her at a local Burger King. He offers her lunch. She somewhat disdainfully declines and says that she would "prefer to eat food cooked by a proper chef." Their dialogue continues:
Adam: You know why people like you don't like fast food?
Helene: Sorry, people like me?
Adam: Because it's food for the working class.
Helene: Excuse me?
Adam: Justify why it costs $500 more to eat at a place where we work than it does at a place like this.
Helene: Because the food here is made with too much fat, and too much salt, and too many cheap cuts of meat.
Adam: You just described most classic French peasant dishes: goulash, bourguignon, cassoulet. Shall I go on? What you should have said is that the problem with this place is that it's too consistent. And consistency is death.
Helene: Consistency is what every great chef strives for.
Adam: No. A chef should strive to be consistent in experience but not consistent in taste.
When I first witnessed this conversation, I thought of certain well-known visual artists --- those who are much celebrated but who have become stagnant and repetitive over time. Precisely what's disappointing about their work is that they offer viewers the same intellectual flavors, the same set of meanings, over and over, seemingly having given up on experimenting in ways that risk failure. Two particular artists leapt to mind: Kehinde Wiley and KAWS. The styles and characters they have developed have made them world-famous, but now, decades on, their work is the equivalent of empty aesthetic calories.
Putting aside for a moment the very fractious dispute about the sexual assault charges recently leveled against Wiley, let me briefly recount how the artist came to prominence. In the early 2000s, Wiley made a brilliant incursion into the contemporary art scene with painting that impelled art audiences to look differently at Black men. He applied the techniques of European Grand Manner portraiture to men Wiley found in Harlem, where he was an artist in residence. His first solo exhibition, Passing/Posing, occurred in 2002 at the Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, IL. This early work had his subjects enveloped in ornately decorative backgrounds while holding poses associated with High Renaissance painting. Yet, deviating from the tradition, Wiley depicted the men in typical streetwear: jeans, hoodies, jerseys, and puffer jackets. Over time, the work evolved to place his figures in highly romanticized and heroic scenes: brandishing a saber while astride a stallion rearing up on its hind legs, majestic and regal, and not outfitted in doublets and hose, but in blue jeans, Timbs, and a white tank top as seen in "Officer of the Hussars" (2007).
Upon arrival, the import of this work was read as powerful. The National Gallery says: "His images -- as part quotation, part intervention -- raise questions about power, privilege, identity, and above all highlight the absence or relegation of Black figures within European art." For those who had been looking at European art seriously, this absence had been fairly obvious, but for the general public, seeing the ways that Black people had been shut out of some of the most compelling stories our society tells itself was a revelation. The Phoenix Museum recognizes:
"His figurative paintings and sculptures present young, urban, black and brown men as heroic, powerful, majestic, and sublime to critique notions of masculinity and physicality that are attributed to them."
Against a tide of popular culture representations in film and television that offered Black men as objects to fear, Wiley's painting-as-alchemy transformed the everyday Black male figure into someone to be valued, valorized, and desired. More, Wiley made a point of talking about how he made the work from his own queer attraction to Black men. His lush, brightly colorful style is visually seductive, and he monumentally sized the paintings so that they looked like tributes to eminent and esteemed public figures. The work, in its compelling celebration of Blackness, gained such a hold on the popular imagination that, in 2017, Wiley was chosen to paint the official portrait of former President Barack Obama, unveiled the following year at the National Portrait Gallery.
For me, it was remarkable that Wiley reinvigorated the credo "Black is beautiful" after it had been languishing at the periphery of public consciousness since the end of the classic Civil Rights Movement. His work insisted that Black people did not have to assimilate or become other than they are to be seen as valid --- they just required a framing that made the mechanisms of public approval more starkly apprehensible. I recall seeing Wiley's work over the course of the past decade, each time thinking that, in some ways, it seems inevitable --- that if he had not invented this work, someone would have had to. Our culture was crying out for this intervention. This is one of the strongest endorsements I can give a work of art.
Since those first shows, he has continued ploddingly churning out paintings that conjure the same trick. The work has gone from revelatory to insipid. The last show of his I saw was "An Archaeology of Silence," which opened last year at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. There were several sculptures in bronze that took the theme of the systematic violence meted out to Black people to the extent of making the figures slumped and limp, as if stripped of life by violence. Critic Sebastian Smee insightfully disentangles the show:
“His art is algorithmic. It's probabilistic. It's art that leads with the concept, caring little for the sanctity and surprise of intuitive decision-making .... But it's sad: Instead of revealing unknown depths, all this sophistication, all these grand claims swarm on the surface, as in high-end advertising .... What he's selling is kitsch.”
I agree with Smee and am saying a similar thing using different language and a distinct framework: Wiley's work is now a caricature of itself. It purports to show Black experience at the hands of systematized violence. But there's no sense that the artist is asking questions about violence, its contours, its causes or effects, and there's no attempt to find anything intellectually nourishing in the way of answers. This lack of meaningful questioning is apparent in the work of KAWS as well.
The history of KAWS reveals an artist who has ambitions quite different from Wiley's. Brian Donnelly began his aesthetic career as a Jersey City spray can street artist in the early 1990s. According to Hrag Vartanian of Hyperallergic, he "overlaid his balloon head figures with eyes X'd out onto fashion ads in phone booths and bus shelters around New York City." According to Artsy, Donnelly also spent his first year in the arts working for Disney as an animator, and then,
“KAWS took inspiration from the company's signature cartoon, Mickey Mouse, to create his own set of characters that he named "Companions." With gloved hands and X's for eyes, "Companions" first appeared in KAWS's graffiti works across New York City in the late 1990s. By the end of the decade, the street artist created his first three-dimensional version, and his characters have since taken on a variety of colors, sizes, and poses.”
Essentially, Donnelly created a character with a nostalgic anchor, but one that could float bereft of race, gender, or socio-economic class. The figures have hands covered in white gloves. Their feet are clad in rounded moon boots that look like a cartoon character's. The face features humongous bulbous ears, two dots for nostrils, and a mouth that is described by a flange separated by three lines. In other words, they are inoffensive and open for a range of meanings to be projected onto them.
This approach of making pablum that would be easily digested can be seen in his early paintings. Donnelly responds to the backlash against his painting of the Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong by saying: "I would never create an artwork that tries to offend any individual person, group or country. I enjoy creating global work that respects all people." To be momentarily reductive, this sounds like a version of "If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything," though it is also, simultaneously, a savvy marketing strategy.
In avoiding any of the pitched cultural battles for meaning and human agency (think about the controversy regarding whether the Teletubbies were gay), he has largely evaded sustained critical assessment and has become a darling of the marketplace. Hypebeast reported in 2019 that "KAWS shattered an auction record by selling his painting THE KAWS ALBUM for $14.8 million USD, 14 times more than its pre-sale estimate." Peter Schjeldahl describes this work as "a busy painting of 'Simpsons' characters massed in imitation of the teeming album cover for the Beatles' 1967 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.'" The painting affirms that television, mainstream music, and contemporary visual art can essentially offer the same sensation: whimsical entertainment.
His Companions are what earned his reputation as someone who has made contemporary art commensurate with quirky, playful, collectible toys. They offer an acquisitive culture that is also vaguely melancholy, bored, listless, and cynical, an experience that doesn't require intellectual or emotional work and is available at a variety of price points. Right now on Artsy, a buyer might purchase for only $1500 a Blush Companion from 2017, or for as much as $125,000 a four-foot black version (undated) that flirts with the grotesque by being half dissected, the left side revealing the brain, musculature and internal organs of the human torso.
Our culture teaches us to respond to naked commercial ambition more robustly than we do to those who pose questions that draw out our ethics and politics, perhaps because we recognize that in answering these queries, we might alienate people who might be potential customers, followers, or supporters. But street art was always alienating --- in fact I have long disliked its purposeful colonization of public space. I have --- mostly because of colleagues' arguments --- come to respect its drive to combat the forces of gentrification and commercialization. But Donnelly opted not to use that energy of the streets to critique or become a poet warrior but rather to offer products for consumption to those who prefer to consume art like they consume other products of culture: in bite-sized pieces. Vartanian argues:
Collectors of Kaws don't want to hear the art sucks, because deep down they know. They don't want art that challenges them, they want brands and decor that signal their wealth without offering insight. It has become commonplace to expect to see Kaws on a TikTok video of some rich commercial developer's McMansion alongside Gucci furniture, a Versace branded ceiling, and other trappings of newfound status.
Donnelly has caught the faddish slipstream of desire for art that, like Keith Haring's energetic stick people, once felt untamable, because it was often placed before the public's view guerrilla style, asking neither for permission nor forgiveness. Perhaps there is a thrill for the customer who has found the domesticated version of what was once a feral creature transformed into a Swatch watch placed on their wrist, or a Companion triumphantly posted by the vestibule of their McMansion. By becoming a sought-after brand at a range of levels in the art market, Donnelly's Companions also evade the issue of critical approval.
Peter Schjeldahl again expands on this point:
“It isn't a taste. It's an illustrated success story---naked ambition as its own reward, with just enough tacit irony to disarm some doubters. To Donnelly's credit, he has shaken up the art world, humbling gatekeepers who would love to keep him out but can't any longer.”
Taste is a key term here. Ever since Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel's trenchant examination of the socioeconomic class profiles of those who attend European art museums, the term has come to be popularly understood as a marker of someone's habitus. The Oxford reference site describes the habitus as "A set of norms and expectations unconsciously acquired by individuals through experience and socialization as embodied dispositions." The shorthand version is that the bourgeoisie and upper classes (and their apologists) often pretend that their sense of aesthetics is merely innate as opposed to absorbed over time from their environment and correlated with a system of inequality that encourages the poor and working classes to imagine that they do not belong in the museum. Those who defend the work of KAWS often contend that his work is demotic in the best sense of the term: It is for the people, those who do not typically find themselves welcomed into the provinces of contemporary art. They might also argue that an endemic problem with the public museum is that it doesn't fulfill its democratic mandate of welcoming all of the general public. However, I would like to know whether those who flocked to visit KAWS: WHAT PARTY at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021 saw anything else while they were in the museum, and how many returned for other, less populist exhibitions. This is to ask whether the art whetted an appetite for more or deeper engagement with ideas.
Perhaps the question that we should be asking is whether it is worth it to the visitor and to those who care what happens to visitors to consume the same aesthetic flavors over and over. Might that deaden the palate? Might this make it less likely that someone will wrestle with the highly conceptual work of Cameron Rowland, or the heaving, slack weight of Berlinde De Bruyckere's bodies? Will they consider the work of Trenton Doyle Hancock, an artist who delves into whimsy and absurdity and a bit of the grotesque, interested in seeing what useful collisions might occur between his invented Black superhero Torpedo Boy and the Ku Klux Klan? His work has a wide range of expression: painting, sculpture, installation, comics, and paintings that read as sculptural. In all its iterations, you can see the constant probing for what the next chapter of the unfolding narrative might be and who his avatar might become in light of that question. This work allows us to understand that our palates can be sensitive to a range of tastes, and that artists might use their gifts to expand this range of what we might savor, to widen out the horizon of experience rather than shrinking it.
I am not contending that Wiley and Donnelly dumb down the general public's taste. Rather they homogenize it. Wiley makes the case that it's about racial uplift and that elevation happens through art historical criticism and revision. Donnelly urges us to have a moment of delight while letting go of any expectation to make meaning in the light shed by his work. They are very different artists, but they make a similar case: what is comfortable and familiar is what the general public wants and should be given. When we have labored for most of the workday, why choose to work even more when we go to the museum to have some moments of leisure? The intellectual and emotional work we do to understand what each artist is proposing, and gauging whether it resonates with us and how deeply that resonance might go, sharpens our ability to make meaning. We want and need work that impels us to engage sensually with the world. The poet Denise Levertov reminds us:
The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination's tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
SR.