Before the music video for Kanye West's All Day/I Feel Like That made its US debut in a four-day pop-up exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma; 25-28 July), West joined the video's director Steve McQueen—the only Turner Prize winner to also land an Academy Award (for 12 Years a Slave)—to talk to Lacma director Michael Govan in a small, high-security event on Friday night (24 July).
The three-way conversation at Lacma lasted over an hour, as they went from an account of how the collaboration was kickstarted this winter (a run-in in the Dover Street Market in London played a role) to more poetic topics like "truth and beauty" (Govan and West), the art world as home to "genre-bending and experimentation" (Govan), the "intimacy and vulnerability" of West's song I Feel Like That (McQueen) and the power of "extreme forms of beauty" (West, on his wife Kim Kardashian's physical beauty and his own "sonic beauty").
What was largely absent from the conversation, despite some gentle prompts from Govan, was discussion of the video being exhibited at the museum: a nine-minute long film that McQueen shot in a single take featuring two of West's songs. It shows the musician moving through a large, empty warehouse with a boxer's sort of jumpy energy until he collapses, breathless, and the first aggressive song segues into a sweeter one.
Also missing from the night: not one of Lacma's speakers could be heard to utter the term "music video". Govan, who called his guests "two of the most extraordinary artists working today", kept referring to the video as "this piece" —as in "this particular piece is so stark and powerful". West and McQueen tended to call it "the collaboration," if they mentioned it at all.
Granted, other video artists have been careful to distinguish their work from music videos, such as Doug Aitken. But McQueen did call his collaboration with West a music video in an interview with Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) earlier this year when the work debuted in Paris at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, telling the reporter: "I always said I would never shoot a music video, and here we did one in ten days. That's Kanye: It's been a wild ride."
So why does the very notion of a music video disappear when it enters the museum? In part, it reflects the contemporary art world’s uneasy and superior-seeming relationship with commercial forms of pop culture.
Govan also seemed to be taking his cue from West. Joshua Roth, the collector-lawyer who started a fine art division at United Talent Agency (UTA), was present at the event and filled in some of the blanks, explaining that UTA recently began representing West across all platforms, "One way we signed him was to tell him that we could represent his interests in the art world,” Roth said.
Soon, Roth said, he was calling Govan: "I said please take a look at it; it really is a great work of art by great artists." Or as West himself said at one point during the talk, sounding rather earnest: "I'd trade maybe two of the Grammys to be able to be in an art context."