the story we like to tell ourselves about the size of kanye's ego might not be entirely sound. whatever the ego might turn out to be, it has been pushed to the backseat in a manner so welcome that it seems to have already hired a decorator. we live in an age where the cult of personality (others' and one's own) has been replaced by the cult of the fan. but the fan has no face, name, pulse or ego. the fan is an impure abstraction and one that refuses to be concretized. take the case of kanye-- with so many infractions (of art and decorum) setting the blogosphere abuzz it is increasingly hard to imagine whose face his work sets aglow. it is easy, of course, to imagine a mass of bland, texted out, ethically and aesthetically challenged youth bowing down to the ones that purportedly serve them. and yes, it is not in imagination only that kanye has sold so many records, graced so many stages and magazine covers. but there is a twist here to the old story of bread and spectacle: while in the not-so-distant past our stars were tutoring us how to become stars, nowadays people like kanye west are teaching us how to be fans. this reversal is due to what could be called "the internet exemption," or in a nutshell, the belief that everything has already been done and it is out there and the true artist is just a fine editor. this belief is the last thing you will hear confessed to by any "artist," but is implicit in the new ethics of creation and appropriation.
kanye is a special case because he comes from the world of hip hop, a culture whose early beginnings were gleefully, and ingeniously, disrespectful of copyright restrictions. on the other hand, however, his method of appropriation is voraciously ecumenical-- no area of creativity is spared the scissors of this particular regurgitator. this may be almost as offensive to our pre-internet idea of original art as it sure is to our pre-internet idea of original editorial work. riding on the internet exemption is this new brand of artist, the producer-turned-blogger-turned-designer-turned-musician-turned-singer(?)-turned-director-while-all-the-while-having-at-all-times-been-a-pain. such branding is useful and significant in that it lays bare the simplistic fantasy that exposure (to others and to information) equals accomplishment.
and this is how kanye gets to make "runaway," a short film or a half-hour-too-long music video to accompany a new record release. in it, one is invited to gorge on a sleek color aesthetic, a naggingly discrepant soundtrack ostensibly quilted from the future release, and a haphazard non-story about inter-species love, interstellar collisions and interpersonal discord. everything the viewer registers owes its claim to our attention to other things we have already been exposed to. at best, the film is a superb work of indiscriminate derivation. there is so much to enjoy visually (a feather-clad lingerie model being one of the lesser joys amongst extravagant ballerina formations, empty high-modernist spaces and domesticated does) that it is made difficult to care about coherence, story-telling or musical background. and that is only a part of the problem--not realizing the primacy of sight over all other senses suggests a missed connection of a larger kind, i.e. between operatic ambition and opera. kanye obviously likes all things in his film but he seems to even more strongly like us to like them. the loop of fragmentary gestures of thumbs up or no thumbs at all closely resembles the alternations of zeroes and ones onto the tape of a turing machine. the more likes the better. kanye is really his own best fan not because of egomaniacal artistic confidence but because he can't help embracing the culture that birthed him. ultimately, his only available shot at stardom is by being a loyal fan.
8 years ago
