When Brooklyn Museum of Art director Arnold Lehman spoke to reporters last Thursday, he was fairly glowing with the satisfied air of a man who had done the right thing. The next day would inaugurate the museum's "Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes & Rage" exhibit, and Lehman saw it as the latest step in the BMA's long legacy of community-based exhibits. More promising than that, though, is the scope of the venture; it marks the first time that a major New York museum has embraced hip-hop for and by itself, not as part of a larger pop culture retrospective. Commercial interest rides high; media sponsors include Rolling Stone, New York radio juggernaut Hot 97--"where hip-hop lives"--and Def Jam founder Russell Simmons' online venture 360hiphop.com. Perhaps that's why the exhibit is so flawed.
It isn't that the museum falls into the orientalist traps that doomed the downtown art world's patronization of graffiti and breakdancing in the early '80s. In fact, the exhibit displays all the signs of a conscientious hip-hop primer, culling many of its items from New York b-boys' private collections. The prerequisite airbrushed jeans and the fat-lace suede Pumas; the mid-'70s flyers advertising Bronx block parties; the Basquiat paintings showing how graffiti and fine art aren't all that different; the Cab Calloway zoot suit acknowledging hip-hop's flamboyant roots, and handwritten lyrics for classics like Tupac's "Brenda Got a Baby" conveying the stark nihilism of gangsta rap's aftermath. Sure, it's a decent start. But between Biggie's leather suits and FBI letters expressing concerns over NWA's "Fuck Tha Police," there are numerous and serious holes.
Every retrospective has a subtext, and the crux of the exhibit's problem lies in just that: what's left unsaid. "Hip-Hop Nation" is curated with a dual focus: the obvious one tracing hip-hop's chronological progression, and a more analytical one that purports to chart the culture's rise in social and cultural visibility. And here's the rub. The exhibit defines hip-hop as a culture that becomes big business, but the big business version of hip-hop is a far cry from the world that Crazy Legs and DJ Premier talk about in the BET-produced mini-documentaries that open the collection. The truth is, as soon as hip-hop gained enough commercial viability to affect Middle America, it gave birth to an underground of purists--those more concerned with the artform than the dollars. Los Angeles' jazz-salon scene of the post-gangsta early '90s; the Bay Area's iconoclastic vanguard; New York's progressive labels like Rawkus and Fondle 'Em: these integral parts of hip-hop's history (and present and future) are elided in favor of Puff Daddy's shiny pleather jumpsuit from the "Mo Money, Mo Problems" video and the poster for Vanilla Ice's cinematic tour de force Cool As Ice. It's little wonder that one observer likened the exhibit to a Hard Rock Cafe. Walking through the five sections -- from "The Roots" to "Pop Goes The Culture," and then into the exhibit-ending store hawking Def Jam CDs and Kangols -- one gets the sense that hip-hop is less a culture than a cultural cash cow.
Kevin Powell (favorite-son pundit of The Real World's first season and Vibe's original masthead) guest curated the exhibit, lending the museum some much-needed legitimacy. Conscious of the fact that hip-hop hasn't gotten the fairest of shakes in a museum context, he vowed that "Hip-Hop Nation" would be different. The curators had taken pains to elicit the opinions from a who's who of hip-hop history, he said; they had been up until 1:30 in the morning the night before the opening, taking suggestions from Grandmaster Flash. Powell discussed his hopes that the exhibit would serve as a springboard to a whole new era of hip-hop institutionalization,from museums to academia. The hopes aren't new, and they're not without credence: scholars like Eric Michael Dyson and Tricia Rose have successfully brought hip-hop into the ivory tower. But Powell's closing remark that as an activist he'd "be the first to say that something was wrong with the exhibit" brings the problem into sharp relief. Hip-hop is a kinetic force, a griot's soup that's amorphous by necessity. Reducing it to money, clothes, and souvenirs--the traditional ways to monitor mainstream success--crosses the line that separates a commercial artform from an artistic commercial. Sadly, it's a line that Powell never drew.