Author: Douglas McLennan

Art is regarded as part of a wide aesthetic world, not sealed in a vacuum, so Robert Gober’s “Untitled Leg” spurs associations not just to Duchamp’s 1917 readymade urinal “Fountain,” Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 “Object” and Duane Hanson’s 1970s Madame Tussaud-like sculptures but also to an Alfred Hitchcock movie and Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West.

Consuming these images is stultifying. To be digitally femme means to bathe anxiously in the images of others and act impotently in response, liking a photo or congratulating others on their beauty. More stultifying is that this is done in spite of knowing the effort that went into each composition. The selfie is a cover-up, hiding both the means of its own production and the true self.

Because the idea of hip-hop architecture is still very new, the design elements aren’t quite apparent yet, though Deconstructivism and Postmodernism are probably the closest reference points in forms that emphasize the design of façades, different heights for different sections of buildings, and references classical architecture.

Turning the past into a morality play, in which grandstanding politicians and academics act as saviours, can have deleterious consequences for the way we understand it. Looking back on earlier times is a privileged and elevated position from which to view it, one that is often distorted by current preoccupations and interests. It’s easy to launch a press conference and condemn colonialism, after all; what’s harder is tackling contemporary social problems, and Macron faces and ignores many of those. It is important to guard against the simplistic and all too easily acquired feelings of superiority that we can have by surveying the past through contemporary mores, centuries later.