In the media, few if any seem to think this is truly strange. Meanwhile he’s been documenting his work via Twitter, where he called The Life of Pablo a “living breathing changing creative expression” and added “#contemporaryart”. Since releasing it in February on the streaming service Tidal, of which he’s part-owner, West has continued to re-record and remix the album, altering lyrics and adding new feature vocals by the likes of Sia, more or less revealing the album as it’s being made. I don’t know if Groys is right, but I do know that when I read “The Truth of Art” I thought of West’s latest work, The Life of Pablo, a 19-track album that’s been out for nearly two months and still might not be finished. For Groys, the internet has succeeded where the avant-garde failed by turning art into the everyday, the practical as opposed to the sacred - this is what he means by “profane” - because “(i)n our contemporary world the internet is the place of production and exposure of art at the same time.” Whereas, in the past, the artist would create work during a “time of absence”, today that work is often exposed as it’s produced: documented in real time, or at the very least, the documentation always accompanies the work. Among other concerns, Groys describes how, historically, the avant-garde has been thwarted by the art world and its institutions every attempt to take art ‘out’ of the museum was absorbed, “re-aestheticized”, he writes, by other artists, critics, curators and art institutions. Those words come from a recent article by the philosopher Boris Groys titled “ The Truth of Art“. Instead, what if West is the Marcel Duchamp-meets-Andy Warhol of our day? What if West is not just the epitome but the fruition of the avant-garde’s desire “to reveal the factual, material, profane dimension of art”?
We understand this version of West because it fits neatly into the self-absorbed celebrity culture we gobble up like kids during this eternal Halloween of our own making. Hearing only his public boasts and taunts, it’s easy to identify him as the purest embodiment today of American celebrity taken to its self-absorbed extreme. The Rapper and the Russian-Born Philosopher