#triple canopy

Today, critics—and maybe the art-viewing public, too—are still unable to prevent themselves from understanding blackness as, in the first order, political. This phenomenon has been exacerbated by writing that overstates the political significance and social power of art, and of the work of black artists in particular. In the past decade, the absence, and moreover the failure, of progressive and leftist political formations—membership organizations, political parties, mass-mobilization campaigns—has placed a great deal of pressure on cultural production and consumption. This has generated significant investments in representation as a meaningful and efficacious form of political activity. The work of black artists—and indigenous artists, other artists of color, and queer artists—has been asked to redeem audi­ences, institutions, and buyers, with its patronage, purchase, and display to serve as reparative gestures. This framework, which suggests that the consumption and assessment of black artists always carries political stakes, is not one that easily accommodates negative judgments.