Review of the Day: Minor Black Figures
Brandon Taylor’s novel is the story of Wyeth, a black gay artist living in NYC. While Wyeth is an artist working in a low level job for a gallery, at least in my opinion, the art world that he works in is something of a MacGuffin — just a thing that moves the plot along — because what Taylor says about art in the book is less than inspired. The legacy of the black artist in the Western world was a kind of wrangling with the long history of subjectification and objectification. Even the phrase negro figuration presupposed a constructed social identity that had to be wrenched open and climbed out of in order to get to a place of actual subjective experience (location 2652). Taylor has some more inspired thoughts on modern urban life: When Wyeth had first moved to the city, he’d tried to initiate small talk with a guy in the cart, not understanding that this was simply a form of liberal condescension and that what the man wanted simply was to take the order, make the food, and ...
