The Trumping of the Anti-Kanye “This is America”

How could an artist sanctioned by the Art World achieve this?

Rapping in imitation Prince…

We just wanna party
Party just for you

Psychotic gesturing indicative of the inanity of the corporate $ellout.

Chained and shirtless and intent on “partying for money”, the Trans/gender fluidity of the Purple Wonder reduced to psychotic dysfunction

We just want the money
Money just for you
I know you wanna party
Party just for me

With all the media exposure connected to his becoming “part of the Starwars family”, the refusal of Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, to talk about “This is America” only serves to make the video art more enigmatic.

Girl, you got me dancin’ (yeah, girl, you got me dancin’)
Dance and shake the frame

Shake the frame. This sums up the controversial yet ambiguous artwork presented without interpretation is a characteristic of great art. We can think about Andres Serrano’s controversial Piss Christ that made the artist an overnight sensation when Senator Alfonse d’Amato tore up a replica of the photograph on the Senate floor, an act that ignited the culture wars of the nineties.

The ritual style killing of the anonymous figure sitting where the black musician was playing a guitar.

We forget the singular power of an artwork existing in its own hermetically- sealed integrity. This is because postmodern art is that it can only be viewed as simulacrum, in the context of copying an original that removes the original meaning by means of appropriation.

An art critical interpretation of This is America is contextualising the video at the edge of the after-postmodern, in the celebrity laden context of the Trumping of America.

This is America (skrrt, skrrt, woo)
Don’t catch you slippin’ now (ayy)
Look at how I’m livin’ now
Police be trippin’ now (woo)
Yeah, this is America (woo, ayy)
Guns in my area (word, my area)
I got the strap (ayy, ayy)
I gotta carry ’em

What I mean by this is the binary of the opposites in tension with one another. The artists that can independently rise now can embrace this tension of opposites.

Donald Glover has entered the realm of the elite entertainers as he gives the hand signal to prove it, a;pnmg with the semiotics embedded in his costume for the MET Gala.

The blatant message about This is America is the announcement of Donald Glover as the new crossover breakout star who can make art with the high production values of commercial fare and get views in the millions because he is corporately sanctioned, demonstrated by the mainstream media outlets positively reviewing the video upon the May 5 release, as if timed for the MET Gala.

“This is America” is therefore offering a signal that goes beyond the content even as it proves in the “have your cake and eat it too” tradition of Andy Warhol, that you can hook into the collective consciousness by making superficial pop art about the superficiality of popular entertainment.

Reduced to making pop culture references to his mental condition, Kayne West posted the photo, left, on April 25, making reference to “a sunken place” from “Get Out”, the 2017 Oscar-winning movie about an African-American victimised by a white family.

Like Kanye West, ambitions in the music world is the path to reaching the critical mass because corporations control the large performance venues and the media.

So, it was with Kayne West’s extended rant in the TMZ Studio that the term “the Anti-Kanye West” came up in the comments to describe the oscillation of opposites in which Kayne has been replaced.

Childish Gambino vs. Kayne West. Here we have the opposites converging within the after-postmodern context of referencing not art but celebrity. And the video’s coded imagery contextualises this with the ending of Glover being chased…

Escaping from “the sunken place” where discarded pop figures end up.

Here we have the Nietzsche’s “dark night of the soul” performed and referenced as simulacrum from West’s reference to “the sunken place” as coding for his breakdown where he was drugged and reduced to rants dedication is the manner that America copes with creative breakthrough that might be critical of the system.

Having established himself as an entertainer breaking through boundaries of large franchise movies — Star Wars — and his own scripted Television show, Glover now offers what could be argued as an “avant-garde” video. It certainly has the avant-garde setting of an empty warehouse, though this is no rundown space where the organic idea is newly born out of struggle.

School children mindlessly imitating the corporate-sanctioned moves of the superstar.

This is a high production video which makes an art star out of an entertainer by way of pulling down the curtain by the methods that the celebrity obsessed corporate controlled media assassinates the authentic passages by which artists, in this case black artists, are born — through folk music and the gospel choir. Both are ritually assassinated by the corporate entertainer rapping about the very spiritually empty consumerism evoked by his disconnected body movements.

The Jim Crow association is highly disturbing against the atmosphere of emotional disconnection of the African American forced to entertain through characterature.

It is agreed that Glover is playing a character. But what about the coding in the video — the White Horse of the Apocalypse, the confederate uniform, shirtless like a slave with a double chain around his neck.

Getting high. The metaphorical leap onto the red vehicle, symbolising the Kundalini power, dancing self-indulgently to his inner beat between the hooded past, the folk musician and the future, the girl/trophy. The old model automobiles relay the ambiguous message — this video isn’t being funded, like commercial media, by product placement.

Childish Gambino’s rap is against the superficial herd instinct of consumerist America, and yet the video is an art-I-fact of the self-promotion of a crossover star who is recognised for his pop gestures.

The subtext is the breakdown of the corporate-sanctioned artist when they have made their message and are no longer useful to the corporate policy of manufacturing the rock stars, and now it appears, the art stars and supporting them through the corporate controlled media — until their programming breaks down and they are no longer useful to the very process of undermining the traditional avenues for art to be developed and shown — this covers the art world for white culture .

Glover is already distinguished as the first African American to win and Emmy for Outstanding Direction in a Comedy Series for his FX show, Atlanta. This is the sign of entering the American mainstream while his video art is the psychotic mind-controlled simulacrum— with its subversive narrative of the “anti-Kanye” who became a fashion designer once he was no longer useful and the breakdown that followed in his struggle to remain relevant.

The sky is the limit for the breakout star who passes through the boundaries and positions himself, as is the practice in the art world, against his fallen predecessor to the throne of pop culture royalty.

The sky is the limit.

Until — as Kanye West is intent on reminding us— it is not. While Glover basks as the multimedia corporate replacement for the superstar musician who never mastered the image and so segued into fashion designer. His predecessor makes a show of being lost in the opposites — forfeiting the democratic liberalism for Trumpism, the backlash returning the fallen star to the eye of the storm where he once created his musical expression.

Paradoxically, the solution is found in Trump’s mercurial reign, which may well be short-lived, to take America to the abyss. The path of Uncertainty, the path between the opposites — which between the velocity of global stardom and the anti-gravity of the sunken place.

When we get art that consciously exists in this tension, we can celebrate a New Modernism. But it won’t come from corporately sanctioned media.