The age of social media has served to empower the fringes, and the newly empowered are always a threat to the dominant culture. There is an illusion that the artist is simultaneously the superhero and the subaltern. Culture, at large, is both the threat and the threatened. In these times of disruption, how do we adapt our practices (and readings) to achieve relevancy? How does one exist out of society and reflect it at the same time? Is “art”, as it exists in its prefabricated systems, relevant? Or necessary? Or useful?

About Christian Haye

Christian Haye is a writer, poet and critic who lives in New York. In 1998 after seven years of publishing criticism, reviews and essays predominantly for London-based Frieze magazine he opened a gallery in the Harlem neighborhood of New York. In addition to presenting American audiences with artists such as Kimsooja, Elmgreen/Dragset, Minerva Cuevas, Romuald Hazoumè, Aernout Mik, Tracey Rose, Jose Damasceno, Monica Bonvincini, Elodie Pong and Yoshua Okon, the gallery also introduced (and sometimes re-introduced) American artists to the world including Barkley Hendricks, Coco Fusco, Paul Pfeiffer, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Julie Mehretu, Shu Lea Cheang, Kori Newkirk, William Pope.L and Camille Norment. Recently Haye has published criticism in the journals May, Atlantica, and Art Against Art. He is currently working on a book about the tenets, exigencies, polemics and perils of internalised racism within Black art and cultural expression.