{"id":860623,"date":"2026-09-25T21:34:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T21:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/860623\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T21:34:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T21:34:13","slug":"arthur-jafa-king-of-pop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/860623\/","title":{"rendered":"Arthur Jafa, King of Pop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art Review<\/a><\/p>\n

His eclectic references and intuitive grasp of memes and virality set him apart as an artist taking assemblage and collage to new heights. <\/p>\n


\n \"Stephanie
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

\"Arthur
\n Installation view of Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony at the New Museum in Manhattan (photo Hakim Bishara\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n

Arthur Jafa\u2019s survey I Am Tony at the New Museum in New York is full of the artist\u2019s characteristic gallows humor that ironizes even the most morbid images and brings to the surface the solemnity of low culture.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Occupying two levels of the Lower Manhattan institution, the exhibition is densely packed with work that ventures beyond the video art that has made Jafa one of America\u2019s most important living artists. The largest exhibition of his work to date, its ambitions \u2014 which it achieves with mixed results \u2014 seem to be to engage in the same themes Jafa has continually mined, this time in even more idiosyncratic and brash ways. These include the history of Black music, religion and secularity, American cinema, political violence, popular culture, and the Internet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Arthur Jafa, “Allegiance” (1899, printed 2017), wallpaper (photo Stephanie Wambugu\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n

One floor opens onto the aptly titled \u201cAllegiance\u201d (2026), a wall-to-wall black-and-white image of a crowd of 19th-century Black schoolchildren performing what looks like a \u201cSieg Heil,\u201d while in the left quadrant, there is a boyish flag-bearer. The stars and stripes confirm that, despite initial appearances, this is a blown-up piece of Americana: a vernacular photograph of a once neutral, outmoded ritual. It has a grainy, spectral quality, and the way its young, somber subjects cluster in the frame produces a melancholic effect. The wall text explains that this gesture was once a customary and patriotic way of honoring the flag, but it is what that same salute came to mean in a 20th-century European context that gives this piece its power, which it derives through shock, juxtaposition, and new connotations that become apparent out of context.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Installation view of Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony at the New Museum (photo Rebecca Schiffman\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n

Another wallpaper, \u201cRwanda, 1999\u201d (2026), is of a photo taken by Jafa at the Murambi Genocide Memorial in Rwanda<\/a>, five years after the atrocity it observes took place. The bloodied garments of the mass killing\u2019s victims are strewn across the entire museum wall. It\u2019s impossible to view this without thinking of the genocide in Gaza, and one imagines its evocation was intentional on Jafa\u2019s part, though the wall text does not explicitly mention Palestine. <\/p>\n

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