When a priest and literary critic returns from providing secret lessons on Marxism to General Pinochet in Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile (2000), his friend asks him what the new Chilean leader is like. “I shrugged my shoulders, as people do in novels, but never in real life” is his response (Bolaño, 2000: 97). Bolaño’s fiction displays an uncanny ability to undercut the art form…
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In her most recent novel The Blazing World (2014), Siri Hustvedt raises the problem of sex biases in the art world. One of the central premises of the book is that works of art executed by women are rated significantly lower than the same piece by a man. “Does art really have a gender identity”, asks Hustvedt …
View More Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World: Does Art Have a Gender Identity?
In his recent performance at the 2015 Black Entertainment Television (BET) Awards in June, Los Angeles rapper Kendrick Lamar performed the song ‘Alright’ while standing defiantly upon a defaced police car, an impossibly large United States flag fluttering behind him. The obvious political nature of both the staging and song choice (with lyrics like ‘we hate po-po/Wanna …
View More Kendrick Lamar and the Dialectics of Performing Hip Hop