Ummm…

Art, man. Art is everywhere, and every artist has their own medium. For Matthew Barney, it's vaseline. For Liz Hickok, it's Jell-O. And for Kara Walker, it's sugar. Walker's latest creation is titled A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby and frankly, that name has got to be an oxymoron, because there's nothing subtle about a forty foot high naked Sphinx designed to represent slavery.

Actually, according to her profile in Animal New York (link below), Walker doesn't think it's a Sphinx.

“She’s Sphinx-like,” Kara Walker specified to ANIMAL at the site of the installation last night. “This was a culmination of many thought processes about monumentality, about empire, about labor and public art, the sort of structures that people visit and reflect upon the culture that produce them.” She adds, “A New World Sphinx, something that envelops the sugar empire, the slave empire. The rise of sugar and the rise of slavery happened at the same time.”

Jesus. Why is that every time I start to become aroused by something, someone's got to remind me of slavery? 

“Cultures come and go. Condos come and go,” Walker says, before being shuttled off to give remarks to the press. “Sugar empires come and go. Bodies come and go… Sugar comes and goes.”

I'm so confused. Art, man. 

Via AnimalNY