varieties of attentional experience

Thursday morning. And again, a week later—exiting the elevator onto the fourth floor of the New Museum, where immense, inexorably weighty bass notes are creeping out of Arthur Jafa’s exhibition. The anticipation I feel whenever I’m confronted with sound, darkness, a doorway. The enveloping music once I step inside.Two strangers and a security guard standing before Arthur Jafa’s AGHDRA, 2021, at the New Museum’s Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony exhibition from Sep 24 until January 3, 2027. AGHDRA isn’t even the best of Arthur Jafa’s videos, if “best” is used as a shorthand for most renowned. His earlier works—Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016) and The White Album (2018)—are shorter films that compress hundreds of clips into a continuous stream of “readymade internet footage” (an observation I’ve stolen from Fanny Singer’s review), indelibly marred by watermarks and low-resolution artifacts. AGHDRA is different: 85 minutes of a roiling, digitally-animated ocean, made with the help…