Take this as empty provocation if you must, but it’s sincere: Kanye West, a guy who knows a thing or two about the artful mingling of provocation and sincerity, is the most important, influential cultural voice to emerge from Chicago in a generation, and you can’t bring yourself to acknowledge that, can you, Chicago?
We can’t have that conversation, can we?
Not without it beginning in a pique of eye-rolling and dissolving into snipes of distaste, accusations of arrogance and gripes about self-promotion and general ridiculousness. Sure, probably you have a point: It is not reaching very far to assume that West thinks he is better than you, and me, and most life-forms. And yet, is it possible you’re also wrong — that, despite his TMZ ubiquity, reality TV wife and talent for the sort of bombastic pronouncements that most royalty would avoid, not even his hometown quite appreciates Kanye?
I ask because he’ll be back in a few days to receive an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Commencement is Monday at the Auditorium Theatre, and though honorary doctorates will also be granted to gallery owner Rhona Hoffman, German painter Albert Oehlen, philanthropist/artist Janet Byrne Neiman and Art Institute President Douglas Druick — as unsurprising a bunch of honorees this side of a society function — Kanye’s inclusion was greeted with eight weeks of arguments against his worthiness:
He’s unlikable. He’s an egomaniac. He’s a musician (and SAIC doesn’t grant music degrees). He’s a flop as a fashion designer. He doesn’t live here. He doesn’t give back to Chicago. It’s a transparent hipness grab for the school. It’s a transparent gravitas grab for Kanye. He’s not political. He’s a celebrity. He’s no artist.
A handful of (mostly online) voices have spoken up to defend the choice — none more elegant than Chicago magazine’s Whet Moser (“What Kanye’s done, they don’t have college degrees for”) — but the chorus of nays, and the general West-wariness, has been steady and predictable.
Yet with each new reason for why Kanye doesn’t deserve this honor, I think: Yes, but the music is never less than interesting. … And yes, but his influence on pushing hip-hop in introspective, self-critical directions is not minor. … And yes, but those shows at the United Center in 2013, the ones that felt more like acts of performance art than rap concerts, equal parts A Tribe Called Quest and Corbusier, drawing on Greek drama, Michael Jordan, Ingmar Bergman …
And yes, but did you read Lou Reed’s appreciation in London’s Guardian newspaper, written a few months before his death in 2013, a kind of baton-passing, from one self-loathing pop iconoclast to another: “The guy really, really, really is talented. He’s really trying to raise the bar. No one’s near doing what he’s doing …”?
And yet every conversation I have about Kanye is harsh, glib and dismissive, the hatred palpable — even fascinating, a subject as compelling as Kanye himself. Among the pieces in “Mr. West,” Sarah Blake’s creepy, somewhat compelling new collection of poems about West, is “Hate Is for Hitler,” which includes the lines: “How can these kids say they hate Kanye?/ Why do they hate? Why is the word/ In their mouths and out their fingers?” It reminded me of something I saw last month while waiting at Los Angeles International Airport: Kanye and Kim Kardashian zoomed by in a cart, and a group of teenagers and adults, floored by their good luck, followed in a long, curious train, then returned to the boarding area, reiterating: God, we hate him.
So this hate thing, it’s not just Chicago.
But why can’t a city that shows unwavering support for Oprah Winfrey, Poi Dog Pondering, John Hughes, Buddy Guy and every Second City alum who held a 312 area code for a hot minute, close its ranks and show some pride for its most vital and relevant, albeit abrasive, homegrown talent in decades?
That question is only partly rhetorical: In “The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964,” the first volume of Zachary Leader’s new biography of the Chicago author, Bellow chafes at a suffocating, insular local culture, one that favors a comfortable, corporate-certified arts scene, generating new voices even as it presses against the shock of the new. It’s a paradoxical tale, well-told in “The Third Coast,” Thomas Dyja’s landmark cultural history of the city: “An America without McDonald’s, naked centerfolds and cold skyscrapers would also be an America without rock and roll, Frank Lloyd Wright, regional theater and a labor movement.” Chicago is a factory for the high and low, as famed for its lack of pretense as its sweaty need for validation, and Kanye West is its wealthy relation who knows his soup spoons from regular spoons but reaches playfully for a fork.
Still, probably the most depressing reaction to Kanye’s invite has been from the SAIC alums and students — art students! — who petitioned the school, handing out fliers on campus calling for SAIC President Walter Massey to rescind the honor, tangling themselves in art-speak knots to explain why West is undeserving.
The most visible, and tone-deaf, of these protests came from a graduate who started a Change.org petition to “revoke Yeezy’s honorary doctorate” on the grounds of — well, to be honest, the argument is as fevered and unintelligible as the hallway arguments about Kanye that I have gotten into with friends. From what I can deduce: West is “a symbol of the infinite pitfalls” of fame and doesn’t value fellow artists, and so giving him a degree devalues her own costly degree. In a blog posting on xoJane, the website of former Sassy editor Jane Pratt, the petitioner, artist Jay Enne, went on to write that West is also an entertainer, a narcissist and a parody of himself. (The petition has 1,500 supporters and counting, somewhat fewer than the 133,000 people who signed a different Change.org petition to revoke Kanye’s invitation to headline the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival in June.)
Egads!
Not all of these complaints are without merit. It was unseemly, and cynical, the way SAIC decided to grant West’s honorary doctorate. The artist mentioned in an interview with Vulture that he had studied at the American Academy of Art on South Michigan Avenue but always wanted to attend SAIC. Soon after, Massey tweeted out an invitation to Kanye: Well, how about we give you a degree?
An SAIC undergraduate has to pony up more than $40,000 a year in tuition alone for a degree, and though an honorary doctorate doesn’t carry the same weight as an undergraduate or graduate degree — in fact, SAIC doesn’t even have a doctoral program — a hint of financial anxiety runs through many of the complaints. None of which is more intriguing than student Rosalia Marzullo’s social media campaign to bake West’s degree into a cake that he would then eat, serving as a kind of protest/commentary on the usefulness of an art degree for a fresh, hopeful SAIC graduate.
That said, for art students to protest an artist’s celebrity, talent for blatant self-promotion, flailing stabs at trying on a new medium — or everyday obnoxiousness — smacks of a deep irony, and an ignorance of art history. SAIC once gave an honorary doctorate to actor Ed Harris, around the time of his acclaimed Jackson Pollock film. So would Pollock himself, a hard-drinking, womanizing egotist, have proved too problematic?
Yes, Kanye has a song modestly titled “I Am a God,” but Picasso, in his own moment of field-leveling, once declared: “God is really only another artist. … He has no real style, he just goes on trying other things.”
But perhaps the most disappointing thing about local reaction to West — particularly student reaction — is how simpatico both sides would probably be: West often speaks of his songs as “sonic paintings,” which is a pretty accurate way of describing how consistently forward-thinking, prismatic and challenging his records can be. He backs up his pretense, and philosophically has shown an uncanny ability to connect the threads that bind seemingly disparate influences, revealing throughlines from graphic design to architecture, fashion to dance, visual art to rap. His career, from his fashion flops to minimalist stage designs — his longtime creative director is Chicago’s Virgil Abloh, a trained architect — even doubles nicely as an ongoing experiment on how to maintain one’s creative curiosity and restlessness.
If that ambition turns people off, if he’s overly insistent on becoming the focus of every room — being the most persistent force in sight, willing to step all over Taylor Swift and Beck on live television — it’s tempered by a sincere need to scratch one creative itch after another. Beneath the grandiloquent self-evaluations of genius lurks a rangy, permanent dissatisfaction with how far he’s pushed himself. I realize I sound like a Kanye apologist here. But those bursts of ego? The marks of a guy who believes a rising tide lifts all ships — so why aren’t you riding his wave? And moreover, why does he have to be the only tide? Why can’t others be as reckless and willing to see collaboration in surprising places as he is?
Kanye once said: “I’d see toys that some people would buy for my daughter, and I’d say, this toy isn’t quality, I don’t want my daughter playing with this. There’s not enough love put into this. This is just manufactured with the will to sell, and not the will of inspiration.” Oprah once asked you to be your best self, but Kanye — he can’t see why you aren’t already.
I find it touching, hopeful.
But do I have to like him too?
His inability to stop, to cease pressing ahead, is not so different from the message of “Ed Wood,” Tim Burton’s biopic about another man who could not stop: Some people create because they must. Or as Kanye told late-night host Seth Meyers recently, explaining ambition as well as I have ever heard it explained: “Get really successful at one thing, you start to grow, you feel like you can do more things, and your shoes start to get a little bit tight. So you do everything you can to get a bigger shoe. So you can walk further and run faster.”
Those reasons alone are pretty inspiring reasons for an art school to confer an honorary degree.
Let me suggest one more:
If you put aside whatever cynicism you harbor, West’s life, his tabloid existence, is useful, such a busy distraction from what made him one of the most important artists of this busy new century that it can seem like a test: Do we have the patience, and focus, anymore to see what lasts? To spot the durable from the ephemeral? I think we do. Earlier this week I sat in on a class at SAIC about rap music, taught by a slender, “Brady Bunch”-looking guy named Andrew Lindsay. He told me about the angry letters that parents sent the SAIC, outraged that their tuition money was going to a school that supported Kanye West. But his class, in discussing Kanye, effortlessly located the connections to the civil rights movement, to T.S. Eliot, to art itself.
Listen to this, he said, calling up a Kanye track that, in its first seconds, took an abrupt left turn.
“What do you hear?” he asked.
“Architecture,” a student replied.
“Exactly,” he said. “True inspiration.”
Twitter @borrelli
