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> Most of the images are found footage, taken from YouTube. Their emotional impact comes from the way Jafa has put them together, shifting and editing and choreographing to create a flow of deeply resonant juxtapositions...

As I read the article, I couldn’t help but to think what a beautiful reason for tools like youtube-dl to exist.

I haven’t found an official video source, only this bootleg copy:

Arthur Jafa: “Love is the Message, the Message is Death”

https://youtu.be/lKWmx0JNmqY

Former WASP magazines and cultural venues “discover” black artists after all this years only because they’re black, nothing about their art, nothing about their inner feelings and everything that might be artist/related that it’s not in some way or another related to said artists’ “blackness”. It’s Get Out (the movie) taken to the next level.
Come on, my friend. We all know that New Yorker is not a WASP magazine.
WASP privilege is fading. It's either melt into humanity or lift the future cultural leaders into heaven. They are doing the latter.

The problem with lifting future leaders is they are not ready yet. They need humanity to grow to a point where the next cultural force has something to say.

"The filmmaker left an art world he found too white" - fuck that guy. Didn't read on after that. Who gives a shit about the opinions of racists. Odds that his "art" is not racist are zero.
Can we talk more about this? I think of hacker news as a place to discuss differing opinions and this response seems like something I'd like to understand better. When does opting out of a cultural scene == racism?
Why are you playing dumb? Rejecting things as "too white", "too black" or "too Asian" is racist.
It's a matter of taste and taste is speech. Let it be freee
It's still racist. I personally even think racism should be legal - in general, people having wrong opinions should be legal. Doesn't mean I have to like them.
>Doesn't mean I have to like them.

Yes.

It's racism if you define a scene by people's skin color. Not sure what there is to talk about.

yaakov34 explains it well.

I do not think that a person noticing that they are the only person of colour in the room is being racist.

You might as well say that it's sexist to _notice_ that the tech conference is all dudes.

It's the same victim-blaming absurdity.

You are not a victim if you are the only non-white person in a room or the only woman at a conference. It's absurd to make a connection to "victim blaming" here.

Noticing such quotas as such is of course not racist or sexist. Acting because of them is. Feeling like a victim because you are the only "X" in the room is also racist or sexist (depending on context).

And are you saying his ONLY reason for "leaving the art scene" was because everybody else had white skin color? Not even because of their behavior? How is that not racist? And if he left because of the behavior, and describes it as being "white", it is also racist. There is no way to interpret his statement as not being racist.

As for "leaving the art scene", I bet he doesn't reject "white money" and 99% of his funding is from white people. In the article it is also stated that "European museums" bought his art.

> Acting because of them is. Feeling like a victim because you are the only "X" in the room is also racist or sexist

Still accusing the victims of racism, boring. And this drivel is a symptom your failure to understand racism at all, and why you're exhibiting racism.

What's boring is your inability to understand an argument or logic. It's not me who is exhibiting racism here.

Again, feeling like a victim because of skin color or sex of people surrounding you is obviously racist or sexist, respectively.

I saw "Love is the Message, the Message is Death" at the SFMOMA.

It was the first and only time I have ever been reduced to complete sobbing in public by a piece of art.