The view from my hotel in London, two months after we immigrated, was a cardboard sign left at the base of a grim modern building, next to an empty sleeping bag:
I AM A HUMAN BEING
ARE YOU?
I put away my luggage, and found myself in Soho on a Friday night, caught in an endless stream of other tourists as they frantically darted in and out of the high-end shops on Oxford Street. Consumption in London’s shopping districts is an art, to be pursued with determination and with complex aesthetic skills. On Sunday I stood in the block-long queue for the British Museum behind a young woman wearing one of Virgil Abloh’s “Off White” tracksuits. Abloh had just made headlines with his first show as the director at Louis Vuitton’s menswear collection; it was so big that even I’d read the press. Too bad for my queuemate that Off White is, according to the couple at the next table during Saturday’s breakfast, already passé. Between bites they praised a different, newer streetwear designer they knew from Instagram. The nexus of trend and meaning is complex. My only Friday night stop was Liberty of London, where I looked at scissors but left empty handed. A fashionable friend calls high-end shops “museums with price tags.” I felt, instead, that I was in a church whose religion I don’t quite practice.
The British Museum, on its busy Sunday afternoons, is a church of its own, one whose liturgy and homage, deeply sincere and barely interrogated, is to the British Empire. This I can understand and parse. (Liberty of London is an homage to empire, too, its very beams and timbers repurposed into faux-Tudor glory from retired naval vessels, its famed prints a result of the Victorian obsession with Indian painted cotton.) In room after room, I found myself asking whom these artifacts were stolen from, and it was almost always someone particular, with a vibrant, living culture. One placard called a series of Indian statues the result of “cultural exchange” during the Raj. I imagine the “exchange” felt a bit one-sided to the people whose culture was destroyed by it. The Elgin marbles, after decades of controversy, came with a defensive leaflet in lieu of an explanation. I expected the leaflet to insist that Elgin had paid for the marbles, but instead the pamphlet countered the fact that the Greeks would like them back with the idea that SO MANY PEOPLE can see them in England, FOR FREE. Isn’t that better than putting them in Athens? It’s expensive to go to Athens. (For whom?)
In the Tate Modern I was on more comfortable ground, but squeezed by the crowd to the “wrong” side of the building, bypassing the “must see” for pieces that are less assured of their place and consequently unlisted in the tourist guides. In one room, Ana Lupas had commissioned groups of Romanian peasants to construct straw sculptures using traditional handcrafting techniques, a project that she imagined lasting indefinitely. Instead, communism displaced the workers who did the hand-work, and the remaining sculptures could not be preserved against the tendency of straw to decompose. Lupas, racing against the clock, shifted her artistic project and encased the remaining straw sculptures in steel, turning the most transient form into the most fixed. Now, instead of participating organically in their native environments, they sit as odd, metallized circles and towers in a museum, a frozen monument to a traditional craft that has been destroyed just at the cusp of being holistically integrated into modern art.
In another room, in a table in the corner, sits Kader Attia’s untitled model of the city of Ghardaia, sculpted in the differently transitory medium of cooked couscous. The great city is composed quite literally of the foodstuff that historically fed its workers, a pragmatic fact turned into a visual metaphor. Here the disappearing peasant was the point in a different way, as both the food and the workers were displaced from their original experience of Ghardaia by French colonialism. When I visited, the collapse of the tallest structures in Attia’s city seemed imminent. Deep cracks run across the towers, and even in the careful environment of the museum it will fall. Later I learned that the museum did not purchase the sculpture itself, but rather a series of molds, and when this version collapses, someone at the Tate will cook some new couscous and begin again, the colonial project of reimagining and reinterpreting native structures being quite literally re-enacted. The placard asks “why create art that won’t last?” but the transience of the medium seems almost overtly self-explanatory.
From metal, straw, and grain, I entered a room filled with a dizzying array of endlessly scrolling neon, so bright that it was almost unbearable. In a display case rested one of Jenny Holzer’s less typical works, a traditional silver spoon carved to say:
MONEY CREATES TASTE
The reference, coyly, is a visual pun—one is “born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth,” and thus privileged to experience the world in a certain way. The phrase came back to me later, eating an expensive dinner of foods I would have been terrified of as a child in rural Alabama. The money I have as an adult has enabled both my experience of things, like Holzer’s art in the Tate, that are culturally valued and a certain degree of pure consumption of the “right” foods and objects.
As both transitory art forms and London’s street fashion highlight, the line between cultural and material value isn’t fixed. Art itself is treated as a consumable project; the purchase of not a material object, but of cultural capital. You cannot prefer anything—art or food or fashion—in a world where you do not have choice, and these choices require a certain financial freedom. Scarcity has little room for “I don’t like this.” More subtly, money creates the educational circumstances that let you prefer one piece of art to another and that appreciation itself is a mark of desirable refinement. Money teaches you how to like a museum, and it gets you in the door. (Most British museums are free, if you can get yourself there, but most world-class American museums charge three to five hours of minimum wage work.) The Tate, like the British Museum, was absolutely packed with tourists checking off the lists in the back of their guidebooks. These people, like me, will now be able to casually drop into conversations that we have seen the requisite famous artworks at the requisite London museums. Those conversations will impress people, perhaps, and that opens doors, just as the correct logo will. Art both is, and is not, the Virgil Abloh tracksuit, just as the Virgil Abloh tracksuit both is, and is not, art.
The couscous city, the encased straw sculptures, and even the engraved spoon all comment on the transience of our lives and the construction of our aesthetics. We are capitalists, some of us more reluctantly than others, in an inescapable, all-encompassing capitalist system. Does knowing how the system self-perpetuates matter? Can we justify our own consumption, even if its object is not material but cultural capital? Is one of those preferable? Is my preference (taste, even) for the city of Ghardaia rendered in couscous more, or less, or equally, ridiculous than the preferences of the shoppers packed into Soho’s boutiques?
Most couscous in the West is made by machines, but in its homeland it is rolled by hand and carefully steamed. It’s a skill at risk of loss, like the making of traditional straw sculpture. Attia’s recreated city is already dependent on a commercial product, not the traditional one, just as the city itself has been deeply altered from its traditional form. The straw sculptures, like Schrodinger’s Cat, may or may not even exist anymore inside their cases. Holzer’s silver spoon is the kind of object that is no longer wanted—our tastes have shifted. My generation, having our own money and our own taste, doesn’t want our parents’ silverware, or furniture, or houses. Money creates taste, and that has repercussions in what we value.
We are all complicit in both the highs and the lows of the modern world; our hands are part of all consumption, to our taste or not. In the world that filled the British Museum, the human cost of aesthetic choices was the death and destruction of entire indigenous societies. For us, it is consumer debt and climate change, both of which are bound to that continuing colonial legacy. It is easy to stand in front of a piece of great art, and appreciate it, and feel somehow above the fray, but appreciating art is itself a piece of capitalist behavior, even if it’s the piece we like best, even if we aren’t buying anything. Our humanity is bound up in seeing how our favorite moments, let alone our favorite objects, are constructed, and at whose expense. We are all living in a couscous city. We can pretend that it isn’t crumbling around us, trying not to see the seams that reveal the whole project, or we can understand the implications of its fall.
I AM A HUMAN BEING.
ARE YOU?
Jessica Thinks 