I ACTUALLY LOVE WHAT KANYE IS DOING,
Kanye held an impromptu listening session for fans and media persons at Art Basel in Switzerland yesterday where he played a few tracks fromYeezus, performed a ‘New Slaves’ a capella and gave one of his lively speeches. One of the highlights of the speech was ‘Ye calling out the most used video (and audio) player on the internet by terming it “ugly” and “presented in a terrible manner”.
[I hate YouTube because] the player is so ugly, and it’s presented in such a terrible manner. I want everything I do to be presented in an art context, as this is a form of sonic art. I was an artist originally, I have been in art school since I was 5 years old. I got scholarships to three art schools, Art Institute of Chicago, Saint Xavier, and the American Academy of Art, where I ended up going—and I dropped out because I had an assignment where I was supposed to do an ink painting or something, and I would take two weeks to do it, and when I looked at my work, I just felt that I would never be one of the great visual artists of the world. I just felt like I would end up like—and this is no knock to anybody that does this—but I felt like I would end up working at an ad agency or something like that. I wanted to make something of impact. I found that when I would drop samples, my friends would react to it more. I felt that I had a real talent in chopping and appropriating music.”
Kanye also passionately spoke about his constant fight against dumbing down of culture.
“Right now it’s a fight against the separation and constant dumbing-down of culture, and I’m standing in the middle of it. So if you know what people say are my lowest moments, those moments where I sat and saw them try to dumb down culture, and I would not allow it to happen on my clock. [Applause]
“So when I used to go to fashion shows with my boys and we’d be eight deep, it was almost like a civil rights, like a sit-in. They wouldn’t even let us in. They had no idea what rap would mean to this world, what rap would mean to the art world. Before the Kendrick Lamars and the A$AP Rockys, it was Kanye West in a hotel room at the Le Maurice getting a ‘No, no, no, no’ to every single fashion show.”