Helter Skelter, Reviewed

I want to sit down with you all and read Aruna D’Souza’s review of Helter Skelter together, out loud, and then read it again: The show pairs two artists — one Black, one white — who have trained their vision for decades on both the US’s foundational violences and its rarer, complicated moments of beauty, through strategies of appropriation. Taken together, their work becomes a bracing indictment-slash-love letter to a deeply flawed nation. But to my mind, what makes the exhibition even more quintessentially American is the fact that the curator seems — almost perversely — unable to face (or at least name) the racial implications of her own curatorial conceit. D’Souza gets at the heart of what I’ve sensed about the show [from afar so far] but couldn’t articulate so well: that it doesn’t quite have a handle on what Jafa and Prince are actually doing as their work conveys the experiences of, respectively, Black and white culture. Also, it still seems buck wild to me that this supposed…