Black Bart Lives
We live in a time that is losing the social and cultural commentary that appropriation arts, or as I like to call it high-bootlegging, offers culture.In the era of platform consolidation, the ubiquity of automated content recognition systems that troll our posts for IP violations, and the dominance of a few major platforms where most cultural exchange now happens, much of the shaded spaces where creative and alternative cultures and ideologies were born, developed, and thrived has been lost. A culture once skeptical of corporations and wary of expanding commodification, has been replaced by one where a deference to capitalism and a push towards total commodification is the norm. We live in a time where there is a tendency to view everything through the lens of monetization and ownership, a viewpoint from which corporations are given the upper hand. Automated systems driven by corporate interests and casual users operating with capitalistic assumptions about ownership and without appreciation for culture, can now penetrate, participate, comment, and report in spaces that once required genuine cultural engagement to access and understand.Our creative, cultural and literal human conversations now regularly include corporate signifiers and properties that private individuals or corporations legally own. Can one 'Just Do It!' without Nike's approval? Are we free to reference modern art without permission from MoMA? Can we speak about Supreme Mathematics without the threat of being sued for defamation by Supreme®?When capitalized signifiers become the signifiers of culture, then culture itself becomes controlled by the desires of capitalism and thus will be bent to its needs. Culture has myriad purposes, but the most important has been to serve our cohorts and our humanity. If it too is bent to serve market demands, can it also serve people? I think in this situation it will be our humanity that loses out.Think of the mixtape era in hip-hop music where many, forget many, nearly all of the big impactful releases, reworked classic jazz and pop music to create an entirely new genre and musical/art culture. Think of early streetwear, and Nigo's repurposing of characters from the movie Planet of the Apes, Supreme's adoption of Barbara Kruger's bold text stylings. Most of 90's streetwear graphics were logo-flips and recontextualizations of mainstream iconography. Think of the cultural wealth provided by the appropriation art of Marcel Duchamp's readymades, Warhol's pop art, or Richard Prince’s reappropriations. Think of the opportunities towards self actualization, beauty, criticism, and the financial doors these arts opened for people.Something is lost when the only capital that can be exchanged is monetary. Yes, artists and corporations deserve to be rewarded for the use of their works, even the inspiration that their works provide, but also, what about our debts to and contributions to culture? Culture is the common space that shapes our morality, unity, sense of self, outlook, and desire. A rich, varied and evolving culture provides the opportunities for many things, but among them are new opportunities for new people to capitalize on. I don't like to speak in terms of capital valuations, but if culture, as it has been shown to again and again, provides a source of value to capitalism, then culture has a monetary value. But more importantly, I think it has a human value.I remember a period when I was in HS when it was a regular thing for me to pull up to a lunch table of my friends to hear them arguing about the racial identities of the characters on the Simpsons. A friend of mine swore they were meant to be Black. During this time you started to see the culture of Black Bart bootleg t-shirts pop-up. Black Bart bootlegs offered an unmenacing, joyful alternate view of Blackness, rare in media of that time. It inserted us into the picture of pop-culture America not as the shadowy character to be feared, not as the victim of an unjust system, but as normal mischievous kids with a sense of humor, wonder, and love for our families. The best of those bootleg Bart T-shirts laid bare that acknowledgment, and brought into public spaces an additional complication of black identity and perhaps allowed us to be more fully human or for America to treat us like they did The Simpsons, as one of their own.A simple, low brow, bootleg offered all of that.————————————————
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