At LACMA, Dia, and Creative Time Galas, the Art World Awaits the End of Election Season

At dinner, guests had precisely the same view of the Manhattan skyline as Kara Walker’s monumental sugar sphinx, 2014’s A Subtlety—perhaps the greatest project in Creative Time’s half-century history. Indeed, those views were partially obscured by the old Domino sugar sign, the last remnant of the old factory where Walker’s sculpture was on view.

Rashid Johnson, one of the evening’s honorees, took the stage and said he could understand why a number of us were “worried about”—pause—“the [Yankees] game…” which indeed was happening that night. But he then seemed to address the election in far more poignant terms with the last line of an Amiri Baraka poem, an excerpt he used in a video debuted at Hauser & Wirth in Paris a couple weeks ago:

“Such intellectuals as we is baby, we need to deal in the real world, and be be in the real world. We need to use, to use, all the all the skills all the spills and thrills that we conjure, that we construct, that we lay out and put together, to create life as beautiful as we thought it could be, as we dreamed it could be, as we desired it to be, as we knew it could be, before we took off, before we split for the sky side, not to settle for endless meaningless circles of celebration of this madness, this madness, not to settle for this madness this madness madness, these yoyos yoyos of the ancient minorities. Its all for real, everything’s for real, be for real, song of the skytribe walking the earth, faint smiles to open roars of joy, meet you on the battlefield they say, they be humming, hop, then stride, faint smile to roars of open joy, hey my man, what’s happening, meet you on the battlefield

They say, meet you on the battlefield they say, what I guess needs to be discussed here

Tonight

Is what side yall gon be on”

—Sarah Douglas