Ben Khadim DeMott

Sturdy New Acquisitions

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Forgive me if I’m committing the sin of self-promotion, but I’d like to add an annex to my piece last month about the MET’s class-focused New Acquisitions show. There’s a trio of music videos—with soundscapes evoking hoods all across the world—that could have added a contemporary flash to that MET show.

“Ghetto Phénomène” Houari’s Le Chant des Ra ta ta—with its bass pace, main string riff, and Houari’s amped but unvocodered voice—was a constant on my Marseille rap playlist. Yet I didn’t realize the song was more than just catchy until I watched the video.

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High/Low Paris at the Dawn of the 20th C. (“New Acquisitions” at the Met)

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Last season, at the Met, a curator with Dickensian sensitivity to class matters organized a set of eleven Paris prints and watercolors linked to the Manet/Degas show. These pieces—stuck in that odd, tight corridor between the museum’s grand entrance and the European painting wing—were part of New Acquisitions in Context: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints. (The title wsn’t the only yawner, who’d stop for New Acq‘s silverware prototypes or “Design for Transeptal Altars”?) The Paris scenes, though, were a trip. So much for peintres celébrès down the hall, Marie-Louise-Pierre Vidal’s watercolors floated viewers into luxe-life while Edgar Chahine’s prints dragged them down and out.

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Forget Barbenheimer — Go Back to School (and Life) with Tariq Saleh’s “Boy from Heaven”

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“Oh! Al-Azhar! Inshallah” exclaims our taxi driver. This cabbie has realized he has no ordinary passenger, but a student of Egypt’s and Sunni Islam’s premier university. “Sheikh Adam” enunciates the driver, bestowing an honorific upon the rider and bringing home Al-Azhar University’s prestige to viewers of Tarik Saleh’s film Boy from Heaven. Our boy hero, Adam, has a common first day experience—crammed move-in, first brush with the library (where he floats through aisles, grazing precious covers softly), first bunk bed night. We catch an inkling of a smile as Adam lays himself down, tired body soon to rest. Beneath the minarets and shady arches, though, Al-Azhar is in flux. The institution’s presiding Grand Imam, a quasi-Pope figure in the Sunni world, dies—setting off a succession crisis between extremist Islamists and a more moderate, pro-secular government contingent.

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This Met is Mine

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Manhattan’s Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery became a haven for Black Atlantic artists in the 70s and 80s. A current exhibit at MOMA chronicles work first shown at JAM and includes art by Lorraine O’Grady.  The author of the following post was born long after JAM’s moment. He encountered O’Grady’s work on the campus of the University of Chicago. It launched him on a trip that took him back to the playful start of his own art-life…

I came across one of the sixteen diptychs that make up Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album—(Cross Generational) L: Nefertiti, the last image; R: Devonia\’s youngest Daughter, Kimberley—in the the Booth collection.

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Soul Show in the Underworld

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You would think Hell eviscerates individuality. Sinners lose their mobility. They do not eat. They do not rest. Their human complications are boiled down to one wrong. They are forced to repeat an action or exist in the same state for eternity: the indecisive souls’ chase has no finish line, and fire and ice never let up for those in lake and lava. Hell’s project is to stratify and simplify, in short, to dehumanize humans. But, the underworld is full of souls with immutable characters and distinct ways of responding. Dante doesn’t chat with muttering masses. Instead, he charms, listens, recoils from the passionate and demure alike. Ulysses upholds curiosity, Master Adam is combative, Francesca refuses to renege on her love, and Farinata’s and Cavalcante’s differing physicalities embody confidence and diffidence, respectively. Their  individuation/human expression is a form of resistance to Hell’s order.

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Bridges to Misogynists

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A graph in a recent Times op-ed by an apologist for China’s rulers summed up their party-line takeaway from an American defeat:

Afghanistan has long been considered a graveyard for conquerors — Alexander the Great, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and now the United States. Now China enters — armed not with bombs but construction blueprints, and a chance to prove the curse can be broken.

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iLied

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I spent my middle school years without a phone. I had an iPod. There’s not much  difference but back then a phone and iPod seemed a world apart. (An iPod cannot use cellular data, so you can’t use it without wifi. iPods also can’t make phone calls.) I remember the biggest (most shaming) difference was that on the back of the iPod, iPod was engraved in large letters. Whenever I used my iPod around people I used my fingers to cover that humiliating logo.

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