If the Cultural Purity Police (CPP) had their way, they would brand British curry as theft, but every cuisine consists of an infinite number of borrowings and travels, sometimes stretching back millennia.
I published “On Cultural Purity” in Seven Stories Press.
Excerpt:
Consider that both Taylor and Schutz are working from representations of historical moments that have been so widely circulated that we might imagine there is nothing else to say about them. But the genius of art is to make things new, and here Taylor succeeds as markedly as Schutz fails. Taylor’s work is representational but only in the sense that it draws from an all-too-real rendition of what happened; it is abstract in that it distills all the elements of the event into parts that are both recognizable (here is a gun, here is a white arm, here is a black man in a white t-shirt) and shockingly rendered as what we had never seen before (the inside of the car is a garish purple, there is a wisp of blue in the center, and so on). It’s a more formally interesting abstraction than Schutz’s work because it dares to delve into the unthinkable and reformulate the whole.
You can read the rest here. Contact me for a pdf if you can’t access it.