ART: Kehinde Wiley Retrospective at Brooklyn Museum

Riotous, controlled, excessive, Dionysian… I've always responded viscerally to Wiley's work, detouring and excusing the superficiality, pastiche.  Roberta Smith's #tags are a helpful reset : " conceptually provocative…thin, indifferently worked surfaces (because he uses lots of helpers)..ecstatic interplay of cultures…exposure of bigotry…contemporarily seductive…raises issues about workshop production and the role of the artist..formula of repeating elements (decoration, pose, garments, props…)". (NYT)

They do make me laugh, and having known as many young black people as I did, I find them poignant. So grand, crazy, a display of status, power, all conveyed by a rigid, brittle and deeply fashionable style, mocking its pretensions while taking delightful revenge is having it all.  

I also value the art-history references, perhaps overmuch, but they do balance the social instrumentalism problem of artistic intention.