Stunting Like Dave Hickey

So, The Yonce dropped a record and it’s whatever. Aesthetically, Beyoncé is pop music’s Kubrick. She builds the most beautiful houses no one lives inside. I hear in her music and see in her videos nothing but a desire to be great and cool, to be applauded for being more intensely preoccupied with those things than any other living human. It’s baroque, pandering tryhardery — a grand monument commemorating the work it took to build itself. I hate it.

That’s my half a bar on Bey. Don’t take it too seriously, because I don’t. I think about her almost exclusively in the moments immediately after she releases something that sends the internet into what seems from where I’m sitting like a mélange of pure joy and unctuous, performative yass kweening cataclysm. I visit whatever just dropped, am invariably annoyed by a few artistic choices she has made, and move on with my day.

Anyway, what concerns me about Lemonade isn’t Lemonade, but this:

🍋🐝 #LEMONADE is for black women. The rest of us are very lucky eavesdroppers at best.

Behave accordingly. (Which probably means, hush).

— Antonia (@antoniaterrazas) April 24, 2016

My tastes aside, it’s cool that the biggest pop star on the planet made a record with black women in mind. It’s cool that black women — marginalized by mainstream American culture as they often are — get to feel personal ownership over something as colossal and spectacular as Lemonade. I’m not one to shit on other people’s good time, and I’m not blind to Lemonade’s significance as a political act.

But the notion that any work of art is for or not for anyone is bunk. While the institutions that police and disseminate art — Hollywood’s various guilds, the record industry, the velvet-roped American and European fine art worlds — are sexist and racist and exclusionary, the wonderful thing about art itself is that it’s inherently democratic. If you can clear the necessary hurdles to experience a work — if you can afford a Netflix subscription or a MoMA ticket — you can do anything you want with it. You can skip to your favorite scene of a movie; you can listen to an album on shuffle. You can, as many feminist critics have done over the years, read a work against the grain and locate its unintended meanings. You can celebrate a work, or savage it, or consume it once and never think about it again. Everything is permissible.

Which also means that everyone gets to do criticism about whatever interests them, no exceptions. This principle is good and true, even if it doesn’t singlehandedly solve any of the aggravating institutional lunkheadery that renders the critical sphere somewhat-to-viciously hostile toward anyone who isn’t fair-skinned and male. The mastheads of the country’s most influential publications aren’t shining beacons of equality and representation, and the broader culture value the opinions of white dudes more than those held by anyone else except the odd white lady. So it must be frustrating for black women when something as explicitly about black femininity as Lemonade drops and most of the noise about it emanates from white mouths. It must feel like a particularly egregious act of trespassing inflicted upon a group of people whose lawn has been ground to dust by the boots of unwelcome guests.

But the solution to this injury isn’t that white folks should clam up about black art. That’s fascistic and short-sighted and fixes little. To not want to read a white critic or to despise what they say is reasonable enough, but it’s asinine to decree a priori that a white critic can’t possibly do worthwhile work on Lemonade in the same way it’s asinine to assume a black critic has nothing novel to say about Born To Run. And anyway, criticism has no moral obligation. It can delineate truths and promote social justice, but it doesn’t have to. I find a lot of crit with its heart in the right place dull as shit. I want unique thought in what I read. Correct thought is a secondary concern. I think this in part because I’m a white guy and incorrect thought doesn’t hurt my feelings or other me or further misconceptions about my inferiority. But I can only be what I am. I care about other people’s sensitivities, no matter how valid, only up to a point.

And that point lies somewhere south of the notion that some black women and their allies don’t like that people who aren’t black women are publicly opining about an album that I’m going to hear playing out of every third car that passes my apartment this summer. The siloing of art — this film is for one group; that book is for another — runs counter to what’s radical and magnificent about it in the first place. Art is for all of us: neophytes and connoisseurs, white and brown, wherever on the gender and sexuality spectrums we might land. When the conversation about a work reflects that — as the conversation about a work as blockbuster-big as a Beyoncé record has the potential to — we are able to appreciate it completely, like an object illuminated by light beamed from all directions. The critical sphere realizes the democracy that’s baked into the work the moment it becomes available to us.

This doesn’t happen often enough. If art is fundamentally democratic, then the business of it and the businesses built around it aren’t, and that can be remedied only by hiring more critics of color at major media outlets, by grooming more female movie producers and greenlighting more projects from television showrunners who don’t look like David Simon or Dan Harmon, by publishing novels written by non-Park Slopers. Unfortunately you and I can’t do much about this other than rabblerouse. But here is somewhere to start, because it’s part of this democratic dream, too, and it’s easy: everyone gets to do criticism about whatever interests them, no exceptions. To not believe in this is philistine.

Originally published at yellingintospace.tumblr.com.