Late attempts at avant-garde legitimacy read as transparent cultural cringe.

Evidence

By this point, Kanye had done the most to integrate high fashion and contemporary art into hip-hop. Perhaps feeling pressure to keep up, Jay-Z made his own attempt to go avant-garde. He performed a new track, “Picasso Baby,” for six straight hours in a New York gallery as part of a Marina Abramović–inspired piece. Despite notable attendees like Rosie Perez, Adam Driver, Judd Apatow, and Glenn O’Brien, the effort fell flat. Critics derided it as “cultural cringe,” a transparent bid for highbrow legitimacy. Even Abramović was displeased, alleging that Jay-Z failed to deliver promised support for her institute. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 367

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘Picasso Baby’ failure illustrates how copying omnivore taste once it has saturated loses all signal — a case in point for the counter-argument that blankness is real.