Days of Take
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the problems of commodity culture across broad social inequality, high art snobbery, and racial criminalization. It provided an image of a moment when all of art’s egalitarian rhetoric wafted away, leaving only a bunch of over valued plastic and metal (a bunch of stuff). That, and the stuff’s erstwhile owners, who wanted it back. A high-end purveyor of street For an art heist, it was righteous. On the art is a contradiction on its face— afternoon of June 1st, as the rage over not least because the genre’s Black the murder of George Floyd unfurled and Latinx innovators worked on down Melrose Avenue, a group of the actual streets. 5Art’s website protesters noticed a gallery called 5Art. promotes the collectability of what Someone smashed the glass. The few it sells by touting its subversion, playfulvideos that have surfaced show a dozen ness, and quasi-illegality. “Street artists or so people, masked against the spread are not seen as vandals anymore,” of Covid-19, emerge, clutching their said gallery co-founder Julie Darmon, trophies—the pink chrome flash of “but as part of our society’s freedom a Koons, the cotton candy hues of skate of speech.”² (This in a press release for decks. Then, in the climactic moment, the gallery’s second exhibition, which a looter hauls out a four-foot-high KAWS opened on the occasion of Bastille Companion sculpture, one of the artist’s Day, 2018—the owners are French.) many iterations of a skull-headed To collectors—if not to cops—street Mickey Mouse. The gallery had stenciled artists are not seen as vandals anymore. its exterior wall with inspirational Looters, on the other hand… On the phrases, which now bookended the gallery’s Instagram, in a now-deleted breach: “BELIEVE IN YOUR #SELFIE,” post, 5Art expressed sympathy for “I’M SO AVAILABLE,” and “LIFE IS ____.” the death of George Floyd but asked By the day’s end, this graffiti would be for help recovering their property. appended: “fuck white art.” “The ‘but’ in this statement,” A KAWS Companion isn’t art so writes Margaret Carrigan in The Art much as it is swag: a toy for millionaires Newspaper, “is the unequivocal defense to conspicuously consume. It’s legible in of white privilege in the art world.”³ this way to a broad audience—looted, There is a direct relationship between despised, and coveted for the same state-sanctioned violence and the act reason. The farcical image of a greyof looting: from the Middle Passage scale Companion being hefted through to Posse Comitatus⁴ to George Floyd, a ring of shattered safety glass caught whites have been the brutal arbiters of the eye of not just art-worlders, but property. In her 2014 essay, “In Defense sneakerheads. Artist Brad Troemel has of Looting,” Vicky Osterweil writes done illuminating work on the KAWS that “the earliest working definition complex, describing how a KAWS of blackness may well have been ‘those “artwork” slips between the realm of who could be property…’ The specter street art, fine art, and plain commercial of slaves freeing themselves could be product.¹ KAWS is successful in each seen as American history’s first image of these three arenas because of his of black looters.” And so, “for most aptitude in the other two, but he’s a of America’s history, one of the most global force because of the latter. The righteous anti-white supremacist t cycle begins and ends with the object: actics available was looting.”⁵ This is the plastic Companion statue is the not to advocate looting, or—to borrow privileged point—the POS, if you will. Osterweil’s wording— to draw “some As one KAWS consumerist destiny absurd ethical equivalence between spiraled out of control, it neatly phrased freeing a slave” and grabbing a KAWS
Travis Diehl
1. Brad Troemel, “The Kaws Report,” YouTube video, June 27, 2019, 16:24, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NkOj3lRSndA.
