Doreen St. Félix: "Documents of Mundanity"

Welcome to the critic and her publics, from the New York Review of Books and Lit Hub. I'm your host, Marva Emre. In this live interview series, I ask the best and most prominent critics working today to perform criticism on the spot, on an object they've never seen before. There's a glimpse into brilliant minds at work, performing their thinking, taking risks, and making spontaneous judgements, which are sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. When I was preparing for this conversation, there was some sort of glitch on the New Yorker's website. When I typed in Doreen St. Felix to pull up her reviews and essays, it retrieved every single article ever written in the history of the magazine. This struck me as appropriate because Doreen is the most prolific critic I know, with wide ranging interests and surprising subjects. Here are some of the artists I've learned about through her work. There's the violinist Sudan Archives, who Doreen writes, does not stand still when she performs. She has used choreography inspired by video games, twirling her bow as if it were a sword or a snake, as if she were a charmer or a warrior. Currently she has equipped herself with a studded quiver, drawing her bow like an archer. There's the cult stargazer Susan Miller, who gives readings perched on top of a trunk, which is, I quote again, "space blue on the exterior with a circular aperture that reveals the inside where orbs representing Saturn and Pluto hang." There's the photographer Alicia Rodriguez Alvisa, who's doubled images of women Doreen compares to taking a selfie. I think of how I sometimes turn my phone on myself, and I'm then confronted by dozens of antagonizing copies of me that curdle into an image nothing like the idea of what I want to look like. Doreen writes about everything, public art and the history of Confederate monuments, the Republican primary debates, the New Kesha album, anti-Black police violence, the photographs of Clifford Prince King, Jerry Springer, Alex Trebek, and of course, television. If you've watched it, Doreen has written about it, in her gorgeously sinewy style with her sharp political acumen and her wicked sense of humor. Her television column from 2020 to 2022 will be regarded as one of the founding archives of television criticism. I think of her as our John Berger, a Berger for the Screen Era. Doreen was named on the Forbes 30 under 30 media list in 2016. In 2017, she became a staff writer for the New Yorker and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Colombs and Commentary. And in 2019, she won in the same category. I'm delighted to have her as our guest today. So I start these events the same way every single time. Most of the people in our audience are college students. Can you narrate how you got from where they are to where you are today? I've noticed how you start the conversations. I studied up before I got here because I wanted to be one of your favorite guests. But the interesting thing is the fact that you are all at an event at the writing center means that you were at light years ahead of me than I was at your age. I started off in college studying neuroscience. Really? I was convinced, or I guess I was burdened with this idea that I was meant to be a medical doctor. I grew up in a very, I wouldn't say conservative, but a Catholic home in Deep South Brooklyn, both of my parents worked as healers. They both worked in medicine. And although I was surrounded by art and they really loved and cared about art, there was a sense that in order for your life to have importance, it had to be a life of service. And so when I got to school, I entered the pre-medicine track and found that I was genuinely terrible, not at science, but at math. And I had an advisor tell me, I don't know why you think that you have to be this kind of person in life. And she gave me the freedom to explore other places of study and I me entered a lot. I did a little bit in French literature and I thought, okay, I want to go to grad school, so I won't do that. And then we had an extracurricular program, it was this newspaper that we ran. There were two newspapers on my campus, I went to Brown. There was daily newspaper and that newspaper only covered news on campus. And then there was an alternative sexy weekly newspaper, which tried very hard to be like the New Yorker. And of course that was the newspaper that I gravitated to. And initially I did local news stories, metro reporting. And then I found myself becoming interested in writing what I didn't know was criticism. And so I became a features editor and I started writing these essays that I didn't know were essays. I had no idea of history or tradition when I started writing at the newspaper. And part because it wasn't in an academic context, right? There was no one leading or guiding us and telling us, this is what you're doing. You are throwing your voice as if you were a journalist at Harper's. We didn't know that. We were just kind of dicking around. And I ran the newspaper and we had like a really good product. We put it out once a week. I will say that I wasn't aware that that would necessarily lead to anything like a staff job. But during that year, after school, I found myself finding a community of like-minded, I'd say, proto-critics who tended to be women or non-binary people and queer people. And we just were almost compulsively performing criticism for each other with respect to products that we were consuming in pop culture. And I still hadn't really grasped that this was work that I could publish anywhere in part because a lot of the magazines that are now publishing this work weren't publishing it when I graduated school, which was just 10 years ago this past May. I think the first piece I ever published was on Ariana Pop song called "Bitchbitter Have My Money." Why that piece? Or why that song? Yeah, so part of my background is that I studied music for very many years in the religious context, you know, I played piano, I sang in a church choir, and I knew that I wasn't necessarily a talented musician, but I had like a real hunger for doing the kind of exegesis work that you do when you're in the musicianship context. I wanted to transfer that to another part in my life. I think I gravitated to that song because I saw the history behind it. I saw her cause playing as little Kim in the '90s. There's this amazing interview, if you haven't read of it, of Bell Hooks talking to Lil Kim in Paper Magazine. I think it came out in 1997 and at that point it was totally obsessed with the cross-section of pop culture and black feminism. And so in many ways, I think this is what critics do. We take a subject and we appropriate it for our own means. And I knew that that song, its message, was going to be the perfect, you know, little surface on which I couldn't grave my ideas about how young women like me were thinking about money, were thinking about heterosexual romance and the like. So that was the first piece I ever published after school. I published it in Pitchfork magazine, I was paid $50 and it changed my life, mostly because I realized I was never going to be a writer if I wasn't going to get paid for doing it. It's the way that I was raised. I felt it was really important for me to feel like my work was valuable. And once I realized that, you know, obviously $50 is not that much money, but it made clear to me that I didn't have to self-gett wise or self-segregate myself because I didn't have a certain pedigree that some of my peers at Brown had had. There are two things that I want to go back to immediately. The first is that you said you and your friends, this community of proto-critics, were constantly performing criticism for one another on objects that were not being paid attention to by, let's say, legacy or mainstream media. Can you talk a little bit more about what those performances of criticism were like, what those objects were like? I assume pop songs were part of them, but can you recreate that scene for us a little bit? Absolutely, so as much as I was living in New York City in the mid-2010s, I was also living on the internet. And I think we were drawn to objects that readily transferred their sense of power or being via the image. And so music might have been one, but also the music video was something that I think we were all very obsessed with attached to. So fashion, although I wasn't someone who necessarily, like, to accrue a lot of material, I became very obsessed with watching how fashion allowed people to present themselves to the world, present themselves to the internet. I think we were also interested in the on-genue figure. There were many people online, I'm thinking of Vashdi as one example, it was this DJ who was always on the lower east side looking like gorgeous and inaccessible. Her images would just absolutely go feral online. I think we were interested in seeing how women in particular wanted to present themselves at this particular juncture in the 2010s where the magazine was somewhat fading. And Instagram wasn't necessarily the marketplace that it is now, but there was this period where people were able to really control their image, also control the profit that they created from their image. And I wouldn't have used this language back then when I was 2021, but I think I just understood that something was changing fundamentally when we think about the history of the image. And that's often what we were talking about, whether that was through blogs, like Tumblr, or even more intimate spaces, like emails or DMs, I would have like these very, very long circuitas, basically tribunals on theory of image with my friends on email. And I think that was just the culture at the time. I don't know that it's the same. I have developed a much more wary relationship to the internet in this past decade in part because I'm recovering from what it was like to be a critic who primarily wrote online. Now I'm writing a little bit more in print, and also because I think the internet is just a lot more hostile in the 2020s than it was back when I was. So you wrote that first piece for pitchfork. You were paid $50 for it, and what happened then, how do you get from pitchfork to the New Yorker? Right, so I had an odd couple of jobs. I worked for, I'd say, about eight months as an editor at large at a defunct newsletter, which was run by Lena Dunham. This was the time when I think a lot of feminist celebrities were interested in publishing. Lena had just published her memoir, and she had done incredibly well. And she had a real knack and taste for the personal essay. There have been many diatribes that argue that the personal essay doesn't exist anymore, or when it did exist in this way, in the internet era, we possibly overly valorized it and it caused a lot of people to publish things about themselves that they shouldn't have. But I don't have that viewpoint. And the newsletter was, you know, it was serious. Sometimes it was silly. I mostly worked on books, I ran a column where I wrote about books that I felt that people should read more. I think the first one we did was on June Jordan. That's such a micro-generation. Absolutely. Isn't it like the girl's era, the, what was it called, Lenny? Lenny letter. Lenny letter. Yeah, it feels, it feels quite, I mean, of course, I remember all of it, but it also feels very, very distant as does the optimism of those moments. And I felt distance from that optimism, and I think I was brought in a little bit because I was the younger cynic on staff, but I also was not going to let that kind of opportunity pass me by. I'm not a purist. I'm very willing, able, and interested in being in spaces that, you know, are shaped around capital, are shaped around selling things. I think that the consumer is the primary identity of many, many people in our generation. And so I started off working for these companies that were about making money, and it was very on the forefront. Yeah, bitch. Better have my money. Exactly. So I worked at Lenny letter for eight months, and then afterwards I moved on to MTV News, which was also doing something very interesting in 2015. MTV News was absorbing a lot of people who had been fired from Grantland, which was this long form essay shelter in the late 2000s, early 2010s. And we had this like playground that we knew was never going to last. There was no way Vikram was going to allow us to continue to publish searching, meandering, long form criticism on music and culture, but we did it for 11 months. And as it happened right before the operation was shuttered, I got a message from an editor at the New Yorker that was like, usually coming to our office. And so I went into the office. And I didn't want to take the job at first because I felt, you know, this is everything that I don't do. I'm an internet girl, I'm a blog girl. I don't do print magazines. I don't think I'd ever been published in print at that point. Well, what's the difference for you between being a blog girl and writing for a magazine? It strikes me how many people's stories, how many people's media journeys have started from these fringe spaces, spaces that did feel really experimental, that came with these strong feelings of community, but with not a great deal of kind of institutional backing. Then if you're good at that, you get absorbed by the older legacy institutions. And of course, there's a lot of ambivalence that comes with that. So how does it differ for you? How did your voice change if it changed at all from being a blog girl to being a staff writer? Right. So I think when I kind of precisely call myself a blog girl, what I really mean is, I mean, the great irony is that we were working in a mode that is traditional to the newspaper form, which is that you produce a piece quite quickly. But there was, I think, a sense of playfulness, a sense of willingness to be wrong. That was crucial to our ability to produce this work as quickly as we were doing it. And I think when I started writing for the New Yorker website initially, I was nervous that the style, which was, of course, no institutional style that we employed at places like Lenny Letter or MTV News, wouldn't work within the culture there, that the pieces would grate against what readers were typically expecting. But I was wrong. I think that readers were really excited to see stories that would come out five hours after whatever the phenomenon is that we were analyzing. So I think a lot of that, the idea that I had to put on a suit and stiffen up totally came from myself. And the writers that I think I gravitate to at the magazine, the most, including you, including Hilton, are people who decide to not take up these rules and decide to play with style. There's obviously a way that you can allow your voice to sort of freeze into one's idea of what a New Yorker writer should sound like. But there's actually a way that you can just give yourself permission and do whatever you want. You know, now I want to go back to one of the very first things you said, and it's about your parents, you said that you grew up thinking that the only life or the only career worth pursuing would be one dedicated to service. Do you think of what you do as providing a service? Maybe not the same service that a medical doctor provides. I'm also the daughter of two doctors, so I'm sympathetic to this burden. But do you think of what you do as providing a service, but a service that is more aligned with consumption and the consumption of culture? It's amazing because in criticism, service is a bad word, right? That's a word that we apply to publications who we think their reviews are just telling us whether or not we should buy something. Whether or not you can buy a television show is what TV Guide would tell you to do. But I think I'm entering my second decade of doing this work. I'm not as bristled by the idea that I am doing something for people who might be deciding to look at that work as primarily consumers. Obviously, I want to live in a world where the criticism stands on itself, where the exegesis is equal to the work, sometimes even better than the work. I personally love reading criticism, never seeing the movie or never reading the book, right? Because the whole point is to see the exegesis being done. But as I get older, I think we have to face the reality of the thing, which is when someone messages me and they tell me, you know, I wasn't going to watch this television show and I decided to continue to not watch that television show because of your review. That's a kind of power that I think is fleeting in our cultural space and it's a power that I do think is important. There might be no form right now more compromised than television as far as capital goes and you were the television critic for the magazine for two years, three years, a little less than three years. Tell us about that process because that's another step that one takes going from writing pieces that you choose yourself or that you negotiate with your editor to having a column that has to be published on a much more regular basis has to come out much more frequently and it's something that you steward, you are the face of it in a way that no one is really the face of like the critic section, that's a real stable of writers, but to be the one person responsible or one of two people, let's say responsible for the television column is also a different shift in one's idea of oneself as a critic or as a writer. Absolutely. I think because I was much more of a roving critic before I started the column, I didn't really think of myself as having a responsibility or as having a home or a shelter and then once I had the column and also taking it over from someone who had absolutely redefined it on her own terms, Emily Nussbaum all of a sudden the stakes felt a lot higher and one thing that was exciting was realizing, okay, I'm going to have these individual columns but what I'm really doing is developing an extended argument about the state of television throughout all of them and I couldn't have gotten that job at a better time. I started the column in February of 2020, which is to say that a month later the only art that you could consume at that time was television. You could read novels. You could read novels, that's true, but everyone was watching television, yeah, everyone was watching Netflix. In an extremely impassioned way, it was actually a somewhat disconcerting time to be a television critic. There was a lot of desire I felt from people who read the column where they were like, "Can you please watch this television show and tell me how I feel about it?" And I was turned on by that ask because television critics, we don't have the Kaya Jusinima, right? We're not associated with a real serious project. We're associated with something more like TV Guide. I love old TV guide reviews, but there wasn't, I think you could say, like a guiding ethic towards television criticism in the 20th century and now in the 21st century, there's a real effort to make it as serious as film criticism and I took that as my compass. I wanted to not neglect reality television, for example. You can make an argument that everything is reality television at this moment in our time. And I don't mean in the Trump sense, but more so, we are always filming ourselves. We are always making documents of the mundanity of our lives and to act like that's not worthy of the pressure of applying a critical eye is, I think, in some ways, delusional. And so that was one thing I really wanted to bring to the forefront of the column. I sometimes also wrote about social media, which I think at this point constitutes a kind of television. For me, it was about redefining what television is more so than covering certain shows, certain genres. I tried to temper our obsession with so-called prestige television. Obviously, there are some shows you can't avoid. You have to write about them. What were the unavoidable shows from 20th to 20th century succession? A great television show. But on the balance, not watched by many people in America, I found when I was looking at the numbers that people still really watch network television. So sometimes I would have to write about law and order. And that was exciting, you know, to look at this thing that in some ways, rest it in a sort of dormancy, critical dormancy, but was a magnet for most television viewers. I love law and order. I love law. It's so far away. It's so far. Yeah, jinx. [laughs] Also, game shows. I wrote about the mask singer. I don't know if you are familiar with that television show. And whenever I would sometimes feel like down on myself, like, damn, is this what I'm doing with my life, you know? [laughs] You think about, like, bar writing about wrestling. We have to wrestle, amazing. We do have to wrestle with the fact that popular entertainment is where a lot of our desires get enacted and writing the TV column, I think it helps me shed a lot of my own preciousness, my own snobbery, but also build new kinds of snobbery. Like, personally, I think snobbery is great. What are you, what are you a snob about? Because you've been resolutely anti-snobbish in this conversation. So tell me what you feel like you're a snob about. Oh, that's a great question. As much as I do love bad trash culture, I'm still a snob about it. I think that there is a half submerged technique to creating that culture. And when you see it, you know that it's being done with intention, and when it's not there, I am very much willing to dismiss it. You know, like, I'm not going to sit and apply a black feminist analysis to some meme that has become like radically viral within the past week or two, which I think is something that happens in modern popular criticism that I have a real bone to pick with. Patricia Hill Collins, Bell Hooks, they didn't do this writing so that you could say that, you know, this social media rapper is a genius. You know, there's some real stakes that I have to be redrawn, especially when it comes to how we talk about black culture and the capitalist context. We will take a short break now and be back with the second half of the critic and her publics. So I want to give you an object that I hope draws together all of the threads of what you've been saying so far, the drawing together of high and low culture, the way that you attend to images, the application of a black feminist lens onto artworks. Doreen, could I ask you to flip over the piece of paper next to you? Do you recognize this? I do recognize this. What are we looking at here? We are looking at a photograph, not a painting, although it is based on a very famous painting. This photograph is called The Girl with the Bamboo Earring. It was made by a young Ethiopian American photographer called A Wall of Rousseau. So one thing that we haven't done in this program so far is give anyone a work of visual art. The reason I haven't done that is because I think it is almost as challenging to describe visual art on the spot as it is to describe sound on the spot as we were chatting about before we got going. And I think maybe the first thing for you to do is simply to describe for people who might not have this in front of them what we are looking at. What does this photograph look like? What strikes you about its colors, its composition, its subject, its point of view. Take it anywhere you want to go. Amazing. We might go to some weird places for people who are listening. So the fact that we are looking at a photograph that is based on an image that I think people can recall. That image being I mentioned earlier from years the girl with a pearl earring is really fascinating. Usually when we look at images, that image is being birthed in front of our eyes in that very moment. We're not necessarily thinking about reference, whereas this photograph by A Wall of Rousseau is drowned in reference. So we have this black background, it's so black, it's vanta black nearly. We are looking at a young woman, her skin is brown, she seems to be black, she is giving us three quarters of her body, she is dressed in, it looks like a dress, it's blue, the blue of the dress starts to recede into the background, that black, black, black background. She has her hair wrapped in this style, it kind of reminds me of the way that he jobbies wrap their hair. The top of the wrap is the same blue as the dress, and then there's this yellow almost like a ponytail and drag coming from her head wrap. She looks to be contemporary, and part of that is the way that her lips are half open. I think people who take selfies that are meant to seduce people know what I mean by this half open look. You let your bottom lip, you know, nearly come to your chin and you kind of expose your teeth a little bit. She also has lined her eyes with coal, and the coal is overdone, it's a little smudged, almost like a frame around her eye that her eyebrows are also filled in. So she's wearing makeup in the way that women wear makeup in the 2010s, and then there's that earring, it's the one aspect of her dress that doesn't look like costume. The way that she's wearing the dress in the head wrap, it very much seems like a stylist or photographer came in and put her in this outfit because there's a sense of disruption in time. The girl who looks like this typically wouldn't dress like this, but this earring looks like an earring that she might typically wear. It's a bamboo earring that you can get at a beauty supply store. It's made likely out of plastic, it doesn't seem to have weight to it. It's sort of waving in the air as she turns and gives us her 3/4 profile. It's shaped in a heart. And because the background is so black, because of the lighting of the photograph, it seems to almost float. We can't really see her ear, but we can see this earring. And so there's like a sense of humor about that, right, because when you think of Vermeer's the girl with the pearl earring, so much of the, I think, appeal of that painting throughout the centuries is the fact that we are seeing this like trony, this imagination of a person, this idealized girl, pierced, you know, the idea of that jewelry kind of going through her body, I think is, for me, has always been the appeal of that painting. And then in this photograph, we don't get to see the ear at all. And so, it feels like the photographer is interested in making a very different point than Vermeer was. Can I ask you to say one more descriptive thing before we get to the interpretation of the difference between what Vermeer is trying to do and what the photographer is trying to do? Could you say something about the way the hand at the bottom looks like it is resting on something, arrested in mid-air, what's the right language to use to describe what's happening with the hand at the bottom? It's amazing that you ask me that because the way the photograph is composed, you almost miss the hand. The hand is right at the edge. It's almost being eaten by the frame. The hand might be on her hip. It might be sort of dangling. There's also, I think, something a little bit naughty about the hand because usually when we see a portrait in this, that gives us a torso up until the head, we're not necessarily thinking about the bottom half of the body, but the hand suggests all of that. It also makes you wonder what her nails are like. If she's wearing a bamboo earring, it allows you to speculate how she might adorn the rest of her body. So there's something about, there's a little bit of kinetic motion with the head wrap and then keeps making me think of whether or not she tied her own head wrap, whether someone tied it for her, whether she kind of swept it around her back and just didn't necessarily know what to do with the hand that had just done that sweeping and decided to give us almost, I don't know, a parody of a pose. Right, so that raises the really interesting question of genre and what the relationship is between this photograph and the painting that it's based on. Is this parody, is it satire? Is it just reference, but in a different key? How do we read the relationship between, on the one hand, the past and the present and on the other between the two different mediums, between paint and photography that are being brought to the fore here? Or is it mad lives? Sometimes I think about this photograph, so I've encountered this photograph so many times in my life and the first time I ever encountered it was on Tumblr and that's because it went bonkers viral. If you were like a cute black girl in the 2010s and you saw someone had redone the Vermeer with a brown skin girl and she was wearing a bamboo earring, you want berserk. But there wasn't necessarily, I think, a language around that feeling. There was an acceptance that it was evident why people would be attracted to a Rusco's photograph. And I don't think it's actually evident. I think there are a lot of confused feelings and also I think confused messaging in this work. If you think about black contemporary art now, it at this point has very much solidified this idea. We are entering the great halls of the museum, of the gallery. There are so many shows now where you'll put like faith wringled next to Picasso, I think moment did that a couple of years ago. This photograph to me is an emblem of that change in New York City in particular art culture more so than it is a comment on the Vermeer. I'm just thinking about the way so many black contemporary artists have found themselves realizing that a great way to get into the museum system is to satirize the museum system. But at the same time, is there a weakness to this idea that we can, you know, kind of black face images that are classic in our Western imaginations? I think that's something that we have to consider when we look at this image. I think about the background and I want it to do more. I want it to suggest its time. The Vermeer is not just the trony, the girl. It's the fact that she's wearing a turban during that time period. It suggests a kind of proto-internationalism. The bamboo earring, to me, can't do all that work because the bamboo earring has a kind of flippancy, right? It's so obvious, it must be a little bit of a joke. The idea of swapping out the pearl earring with the bamboo earring is what I mean by that. I want to go back to something you said in your description of it, which is the posture of the mouth. That seems to be so obviously referencing a contemporary aesthetic that solicits desire and that solicits desire through a particular medium, the coal-ringed eyes and the way that they are smudged, and the hyper-saturation of these colors. That's what's striking to me about the blue, the way this seems almost digitally touched up to create this image, and I wonder if there is history baked into the aesthetic in a different kind of way. I'm just curious to hear you meditate on that. That's a great way of looking at the photograph, too. There's something about this photograph that makes me think about strangely enough of black and white portraits that Malik Sidibe would take in his studio. In part because this photograph is doing the opposite work, those images were very much like washed out. We got the sitter from head to feet, all of their body. Whereas this photograph is so much about removing the sitter from any sense of the world, which is to say that although we have that indication of the contemporary with her eyes, her mouth, and the earring, there is a real, I think, force, not violence, but an intensity on the side of the photographer who almost wants to treat her like she is a painted object, who takes her body and decides to put her through these digitization. These alchemical processes, what we do when we take our images and we decide to put them through a filter, we decide to crop them, we decide to make them fit into a kind of pre-existing, sometimes actual application, but other times an actual idea, right? Sometimes I want to just look like my cell tree face cut off from the neck because I want to convey a certain idea when I decide to post a selfie on Instagram. What's so funny, I think, about this photograph, is like a rusegoo is kind of applying techniques of like selfie photography, which of course means a sitter being her own portraitist, but this isn't a selfie. This is him coming in and he is very important here and deciding to provide his own criticism of how it is that young black women think that they want to be seen. So there are two gazes that are operative here. There's the gaze of the male photographer and then there's her gaze back at us. I was thinking about what you were saying about the Vermeer, which is that the piercing in the ear is what is so important. Here in the absence of that piercing, we have that piercing gaze directed back to us. How are we supposed to read our own relationship to this subject? How do you read your relationship to the subject of a photograph like this? And maybe to put an additional spin or a little asterisk on that question, you were talking about seeing this for the first time because it went viral and how bonkers that felt. And I sense this interesting distance between your attraction to it then, the first time you saw it and how you're perceiving it or how you're responding to it now. The thing about a photograph like this, which, you know, it was displayed in physical space, but primarily its home is in digital space. Primarily, it's the kind of work of art that people all feel like they own. If you decide to repost this on your Tumblr, on your Instagram, it's yours now and it becomes a part of, you know, the Grand Vista three which you have decided to create your image gallery that we all have on our various social media websites. And I think that there's a way in which her gaze, which should be piercing, feels as if it has been divested of that feeling of confrontation given that she doesn't exist in a rare fight space where we would have to go to pilgrimage to find her. She is everywhere. And I think it reminds me of this great feeling of, I think, ambivalence that has developed in me as I'm now in my 30s as a black woman, I'm still young, but I don't feel the kind of excitement of transgression that I felt when I was in my 20s seeing an image like this. I'm starting to feel like the transgression has become more of a surface than a real substantive vessel through which we are trying to change things. I think the girl with the bamboo earring ultimately has kind of fatally tethered to her reference and it causes us to think of contemporary blackness as, you know, the thing that has to be smuggled into the past as opposed to the thing that has its own past and might be better or at least alternatively represented through the context through which it was created. And so that's the dilemma with an image like this, how it ages, we're only talking about 10 or 11 years after it was created and yet I have an extremely different relationship to it now than the one that I did when I was excited and wanted to feel like I owned it and my 20s because in a sense it and the thinking that it represents owned me back then. Do you think any of that is self-conscious here? Anyone who takes photographs of themselves knows that the logic of the photograph is that it will age poorly or you will age and so it will no longer be a good representation of you. We always have this fatal relationship to photography that feels like what's almost internal to the medium. Do you think any of that is self-conscious here or do you think it is more or less unaware of its relationship to its own gimmickry or obsolescence? I think this photograph is completely innocent. I think this photograph was made with the very, very subconscious idea that the world would almost end after it was created. There's no sense of the future in it, which is an amazing kind of optimism I think to have in creating an image like this. I think that a life longer lived, maybe that person wouldn't create this photograph because they would be adult with the knowledge that they would have some sort of aging on top of it, ironically, given that it primarily lives on the internet and images on the internet don't age. I'm interested in it as a capsule, more so as a work that I would apply the kind of active critical analysis to in this day and age. It's so much more powerful and systemic to me is that kind of message from the mid-2010s where there were young black artists who felt angry and totally entitled to do this kind of work, even if that kind of work couldn't always bear the weight of the ideas that it meant to signal. That is all extremely, extremely brilliant. Thank you so much for this and thank you so much for being here with us today. It was really a delight. Thank you so much. I'm sorry. You've been listening to the critic and her publics with Dorian St. Felix. I'm Marva Emre and I'd like to thank the staff at the Shapiro Center, the president's office at Wesleyan University, the New York Review of Books, LitHub, and Kanoff. Thank you to A. Wall Riscoup for this week's surprise object. Thank you to our editor, Michelle Moses, and to Danny Lentzioni for her score. Join us in two weeks for my conversation with Maggie Dordy.