Nicolas Ghesquière Is Playing 'the Big Game' - The New York Times

Posted: 15 Oct 2019 12:00 AM PDT

THE INAUGURATION OF Nick Cave's Facility, a new multidisciplinary art space on Chicago's Northwest Side, has the feeling of a family affair. In April, inside the yellow-brick industrial building, the classical vocalist Brenda Wimberly and the keyboardist Justin Dillard give a special performance for a group that includes local friends, curators and educators, as well as Cave's high school art teacher, Lois Mikrut, who flew in from North Carolina for the event. Outside, stretching across the windows along Milwaukee Avenue, is a 70-foot-long mosaic made of 7,000 circular name tags with a mix of red and white backgrounds, each of them personalized by local schoolchildren and community members. They spell out the message "Love Thy Neighbor."

The simple declaration of togetherness and shared purpose is a mission statement for the space, a creative incubator as well as Cave's home and studio, which he shares with his partner, Bob Faust, and his older brother Jack. It's also a raison d'être for Cave, an uncategorizable talent who has never fit the mold of the artist in his studio. Best known for his Soundsuits — many of which are ornate, full-body costumes designed to rattle and resonate with the movement of the wearer — his work, which combines sculpture, fashion and performance, connects the anxieties and divisions of our time to the intimacies of the body.

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Exhibited in galleries or worn by dancers, the suits — fanciful assemblages that include bright pelts of dyed hair, twigs, sequins, repurposed sweaters, crocheted doilies, gramophones or even stuffed sock-monkey dolls, their eerie grins covering an entire supersize garment — are compulsively, unsettlingly decorative. Some are amusingly creature-like; others are lovely in an almost ecclesiastical way, bedecked with shimmering headpieces embellished with beads and porcelain birds and other discarded tchotchkes he picks up at flea markets. Even at the level of medium, Cave operates against entrenched hierarchies, elevating glittery consumer detritus and traditional handicrafts like beadwork or sewing to enchanting heights.

The artist recalls the first time he saw Barkley L. Hendricks's painting "Steve" (1976). By Scott J. Ross

In invigorating performances that often involve collaborations with local musicians and choreographers, the Soundsuits can seem almost shaman-esque, a contemporary spin on kukeri, ancient European folkloric creatures said to chase away evil spirits. They recall as well something out of Maurice Sendak, ungainly wild things cutting loose on the dance floor in a gleeful, liberating rumpus. The surprising movements of the Soundsuits, which change depending on the materials used to make them, tend to guide Cave's performances and not the other way around. There is something ritual-like and purifying about all the whirling hair and percussive music; the process of dressing the dancers in their 40-pound suits resembles preparing samurai for battle. After each performance, the suits made of synthetic hair require tender grooming, like pets. Cave's New York gallerist, Jack Shainman, recalls the time he assisted in the elaborate process of brushing them out — "I was starting to bug out, because there were 20 or 30 of them" — only to have Cave take over and do it all himself. Much beloved and much imitated (as I write this, an Xfinity ad is airing in which a colorful, furry-suited creature is buoyantly leaping about), they can be found in permanent museum collections across America.

Their origins are less intellectual than emotional, as Cave tells it, and they're both playful and deadly serious. He initially conceived of them as a kind of race-, class- and gender-obscuring armature, one that's both insulating and isolating, an articulation of his profound sense of vulnerability as a black man. Using costume to unsettle and dispel assumptions about identity is part of a long tradition of drag, from Elizabethan drama to Stonewall and beyond; at the same time, the suits are the perfect expression of W.E.B. Du Bois's idea of double consciousness, the psychological adjustments black Americans make in order to survive within a white racist society, a vigilant, anticipatory awareness of the perceptions of others. It's no coincidence that Cave made the first Soundsuit in 1992, after the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991, a still-vivid racial touchstone in American history; almost three decades later, the suits are no less timely. "It was an almost inflammatory response," he remembers, looking shaken as he recalls watching King's beating on television 28 years ago. "I felt like my identity and who I was as a human being was up for question. I felt like that could have been me. Once that incident occurred, I was existing very differently in the world. So many things were going through my head: How do I exist in a place that sees me as a threat?"

Cave had begun teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with its predominately white faculty, two years before, and in the aftermath of the incident, followed by the acquittal of the officers responsible, he felt his isolation painfully. "I really felt there was no one there I could talk to. None of my colleagues addressed it. I just felt like, 'I'm struggling with this, this is affecting my people.' I would think that someone would be empathetic to that and say, 'How are you doing?' I held it all in internally. And that's when I found myself sitting in the park," he says. In Grant Park, around the corner from his classroom, he started gathering twigs — "something that was discarded, dismissed, viewed as less. And it became the catalyst for the first Soundsuit."

For many years after he began making his signature work, Cave deliberately avoided the spotlight, shying away from an adoring public: "I knew I had the ability, but I wasn't ready, or I didn't want to leave my friends behind. I think this grounded me, and made me an artist with a conscience. Then, one day, something said, 'Now or never,' and I had to step into the light." Initially, he wasn't prepared for the success of the Soundsuits. For much of the '90s, "I literally shoved all of them into the closet because I wasn't ready for the intensity of that attention," Cave says. He began exhibiting the Soundsuits at his first solo shows, mostly in galleries across the Midwest; he's since made more than 500 of them. They've grown alongside Cave's practice, evolving from a form of protective shell to an outsize, exuberant expression of confidence that pushes the boundaries of visibility. They demand to be seen.

From left: a 2012 Soundsuit made from buttons, wire, bugle beads, wood and upholstery; a 2013 Soundsuit made from mixed media including a vintage bunny, safety-pin craft baskets, hot pads, fabric and metal; a 2009 Soundsuit made from human hair; a 2012 Soundsuit made from mixed media including sock monkeys, sweaters and pipe cleaners. All images © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photos by James Prinz Photography

From left: "Speak Louder," a 2011 Soundsuit sculpture made from buttons, wire, bugle beads, upholstery and metal; a 2010 Soundsuit made from mixed media including hats, bags, rugs, metal and fabric; a 1998 Soundsuit made from mixed media including twigs, wire and metal. All images © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photos by James Prinz Photography

Following the phenomenal success of the Soundsuits, Cave's focus has expanded to the culture that produced them, with shows that more directly implicate viewers and demand civic engagement around issues like gun violence and racial inequality. But increasingly, the art that interests Cave is the art he inspires others to make. With a Dalloway-like genius for bringing people from different walks of life to the table in experiences of shared good will, Cave sees himself as a messenger first and an artist second, which might sound more than a touch pretentious if it weren't already so clear that these roles have, for some time, been intertwined. In 2015, he trained youth from an L.G.B.T.Q. shelter in Detroit to dance in a Soundsuit performance. The same year, during a six-month residency in Shreveport, La., he coordinated a series of bead-a-thon projects at six social-service agencies, one dedicated to helping people with H.I.V. and AIDS, and enlisted dozens of local artists into creating a vast multimedia production in March of 2016, "As Is." In June 2018, he transformed New York's Park Avenue Armory, a former drill hall converted into an enormous performance venue, into a Studio 54-esque disco experience with his piece — part revival, part dance show, part avant-garde ballet — called "The Let Go," inviting attendees to engage in an unabashedly ecstatic free dance together: a call to arms and catharsis in one. Last summer, with the help of the nonprofit Now & There, a public art curator, he enlisted community groups in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood to collaborate on a vast collage that will be printed on material and wrapped around one of the area's unoccupied buildings; in September, also in collaboration with Now & There, he led a parade that included local performers from the South End to Upham's Corner with "Augment," a puffy riot of deconstructed inflatable lawn ornaments — the Easter bunny, Uncle Sam, Santa's reindeer — all twisted up in a colossal Frankenstein bouquet of childhood memories. Cave understands that the lost art of creating community, of joining forces to accomplish a task at hand, whether it's beading a curtain or mending the tattered social fabric, depends upon igniting a kind of dreaming, a gameness, a childlike ability to imagine ideas into being. But it also involves recognizing the disparate histories that divide and bind us. The strength of any group depends on an awareness of its individuals.

FACILITY IS THE next iteration of that larger mission, and Cave and Faust, a graphic designer and artist, spent years looking for the right space. Creating it required a great deal of diplomacy and determination, as well as an agreeable alderman to assist with the zoning changes and permits. And while it evokes Warhol's Factory in name, in intent, the approximately 20,000-square-foot former mason's workshop has a very different cast.

"Facilitating, you know, projects. Energies. Individuals. Dreams. Every day, I wake up, he wakes up, and we're like, 'O.K. How can we be of service in a time of need?'" says Cave, who gave me a tour in the fall of 2018, not long after he and Faust settled into the space. Dressed entirely in black — leather pants and a sweater, and sneakers with metallic accents — the 60-year-old artist has a dancer's bearing (he trained for several summers in the early '80s at a program in Kansas City run by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater) and an aura of kindness and irrepressible positivity. One wants to have what he's having. "Girl, you can wear anything," he reassures me when I fret about the green ruched dress I'm wearing, which under his discerning gaze suddenly strikes me as distinctly caterpillarlike. It comes as no surprise that Cave's favorite adjective is "fabulous."

Vintage bird figurines in the artist's studio. Renée Cox

In contrast to his maximalist art practice, his fashion tastes have grown more austere, as of late, and include vintage suits and monochrome classics from Maison Margiela, Rick Owens and Helmut Lang. "I have a fabulous sneaker collection," he says. "But you know, the reason why is because those floors at the school are so hard," he says, referring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now a professor of Fashion, Body and Garment. (I also teach at the school, in a different department.) "I can't wear a hard shoe, I have to wear a sneaker," he says. Faust teases him: "I love how you've just justified having that many sneakers."

Cave met Faust, who runs his own business from Facility, in addition to supporting the artist as his special projects director, when he happened to stop by a sample sale of Cave's clothing designs in the early 2000s. The Soundsuits are, for all intents and purposes, a kind of clothing, so fashion has been a natural part of Cave's artistic practice since the beginning — he studied fiber arts as an undergraduate at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he first learned to sew. In 1996, he started a namesake fashion line for men and women that lasted a decade. If the Soundsuits resist categorization as something to wear in everyday life, they arrive at their unclassifiable beauty by taking the basic elements of clothing design — stitching, sewing, understanding how a certain material falls or looks with another kind of material — and exaggerating them into the realm of atmospheric psychedelia. That he teaches in the fashion department at an art school further underscores the thin line Cave has always walked between clothing and sculpture, all of it preoccupied in some way with the human body, its form and potential energy. His own clothing designs are slightly — only slightly — more practical variations on the Soundsuits: loud embroidered sweaters, crocheted shirts with sparkly jewelry. "He came in and was like, 'These clothes are so out there, I can't wear any of this,'" Cave recalls, laughing. (Faust politely bought a sweater and still wears it today.) At the time, the artist was about to publish his first book and asked Faust to design it; the collaboration was a success, and Faust has subsequently designed all of Cave's publications. About eight years ago, the nature of the relationship changed. "Before that, I was single for 10 years. I was always traveling, and who is going to handle all of that?" Cave says. "But Bob already knew who I was, and that makes all the difference. Being with someone who is a visionary in his own right and using this platform as a place of consciousness — it's very important to me."

In this clip from Cave's "Here," the artist's Soundsuits are captured in Detroit. © Nick Cave. Courtesy of The Artist And Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Upstairs is the couple's living space and selections from Cave's personal art collection: a Kehinde Wiley here, a Kerry James Marshall there. (A lesson from Cave: Buy work from your friends before they become famous.) Cave and Faust opted to leave the floors and walls scarred, bearing the traces of its former use as an industrial building. In a small, sunny room off the kitchen, one corner of the ceiling is left open to accommodate an abandoned wasp's nest, a subtle, scrolled masterpiece of found architecture. Faust's teenage daughter also has a bedroom, and Jack, an artist with a design bent, has an adjacent apartment.

Downstairs, in the cavernous work space big enough to host a fashion show, musical or dance performance, are Cave's and Faust's studios. Some of Cave's assistants — he has six of them, Faust has one — are applying beads on a vast, multistory tapestry, a project for Chicago's O'Hare International Airport called "Palimpsest." "It'll all be gathered and bustled, so there's layers and layers of color. Kind of like an old billboard that, over time, weathers, and layers come off and you see the history," Cave explains. A front gallery is a flexible space where video art visible from the street could be projected — a nod to Cave's first job out of art school, designing window displays for Macy's — or young artists could be invited to display work around a shared theme. Facility has already established an art competition and prizes for Chicago Public School students and funded a special award for graduate fashion students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "There are lots of creative people that do amazing things but just have never had a break," Cave says. "And so to be able to host them in some way, these are the sort of things that are important to us, so we thought, 'Why not?'"

AWKWARD PERSONAL disclosures. Long evaluative silences. Talk of "coming to form." Art-school crits — sessions in which a professor reviews his students' work — are all pretty similar, but Cave's are famous both for their perspicacity and warmth. For all his multi-hyphenates, "teacher" may be the role that best sums up his totality of being. "When someone believes in your work, it changes how you see your future," he says when we meet in the vast, light-filled studios in downtown Chicago, where the graduate fashion students are working.

It's the second-to-last crit of the year for Cave's first-year students in the two-year M.F.A. program, and the pressure is on to develop their own distinct visual language before they begin their thesis projects in the fall. One woman from Russia has made a set of dresses from delicate organic 3-D-printed shapes — mushrooms, flowers — sewing them together and arranging them on a mannequin; they resemble exquisite body cages. Cave suggests that she should work in muslin on a flat surface rather than directly on the mannequin in order to make the silhouette "less uptight."

Cave's "Untitled" (2018), which features a carved head and an American flag made of used shotgun shells. Image © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo by James Prinz Photography

Next up is a student from China, who directs our attention to an anchor-shaped object suspended from the ceiling. It is made of small blue squares of fabric she's dipped in batter and deep-fried to stiffen. She plays Björk's "The Anchor Song" for us on her iPhone and explains that the textile sculpture is an expression of homesickness, longing and the mourning of a long relationship. We stare up at it silently. There's a faint whiff of grease. After some back and forth with the student, Cave delivers his verdict: "Your tent is big, but you need to get on your boxing gloves and get in there," he says. "You should be completely, 100 percent in it, and not let your will dictate. Bring all the parts together."

"That was pretty raw," says Cave, once we are back in his office, noting that, when given a push, the student with the anchor astonishes everyone with what she can do. He clearly adores all of his charges, and sees teaching as a way of passing on his own teachers' lessons: a way of liberating the creative subconscious within the technical rigors of design. "You're looking at what's there — fabric, shape and form — and asking, 'How are you coming to pattern, how are you coming to design?' And some have just opened up for the first time, and the moment you open up, there are bigger questions, there's a lot more responsibility, there's so much more to grapple with."

A second-year student, Sean Gu, stops by to say hello. He's just returned from China with a suitcase full of completed samples he wants to show Cave. The garments, jackets and vests, have zips and seat-belt-like buckles and artfully drooping corners that were inspired by Chinese political slogans. Cave and I take turns trying them on: One piece, a vest made of reflective polyurethane with multiple armholes and zippers, is our favorite. (Cave wore it best, of course.) The look on his face is one of pure delight in the cool, fabulous thing his student has made.

Where, one might ask, did Cave's seemingly boundless reservoirs of optimism and joy and productive energy come from? The short answer is Missouri, where Cave, born in Fulton, in the central part of the state, and raised in nearby Columbia, was the third of seven brothers. His mother, Sharron Kelly, worked in medical administration (Cave's parents divorced when he was young), and his maternal grandparents lived nearby on a farm filled with animals. "Now that I look back, it was really so amazing for my brothers and myself to be in the presence of all of that unconditional love," he says. "We were rambunctious, and of course you fight with your brothers, but we always made up through hugging or kissing. It was just part of the infrastructure." Personal space was limited but respected, a chart of chores was maintained, and creative projects were always afoot (his aunts are seamstresses; his grandmother was a quilter). Hand-me-downs were individually customized by each new wearer. "I had to find ways of finding my identity through deconstructing," he recalls. "So, if I didn't want to be in my brother's jacket, I'd take off the sleeves and replace it with plaid material. I was already in that process of cutting and putting things back together and finding a new vocabulary through dress."

A detail of Cave's 2019 "Augment" installation, made from inflatable lawn ornaments. Renée Cox

The artist tells an illuminating story about his mother, who managed the household on one income and would still often find ways to send food to a struggling family in the neighborhood. Once, during a particularly tight month, she came home from work to realize that there was no food left in the house except dried corn. And so she made a party of it, showing her sons a movie on television and popping the corn. "It doesn't take much to shift how we experience something," says Cave, recalling how she would entertain them simply by putting a sock on her hand and changing her voice to create a character. "It's nothing, but it's everything," he says. "You're just totally captivated. It's these moments of fantasy and belief that's also informed how I go about my work."

Fashion's transformative power was also something he understood young, beginning with watching his older female relatives attend church in their fancy hats. In high school, Cave and Jack, who is two years older, experimented with platform shoes and two-tone flared pants. High fashion came to town, literally, via the Ebony Fashion Fair, a traveling show launched and produced between 1958 and 2009 by Eunice W. Johnson, the co-founder of Johnson Publishing Company, which published Ebony and Jet magazines, both cultural bibles for black America. "Ebony magazine was really the first place we saw people of color with style and power and money and vision, and that fashion show would travel to all of these small towns," he reminisces. "Honey, black runway back in the day was a spectacle. It's not just walking down the runway. It was almost like theater. And I'm this young boy just eating it up and feeling like I'm just in a dream, because it's all fabulous and I just admire beauty to that extreme. I was just completely consumed by that." His high school teachers encouraged him to apply to the Kansas City Art Institute, where he and Jack would stage fashion shows, which felt more like performance pieces thanks to Cave's increasingly outré clothing designs. "I just had what I needed to have in order to be the person I need to be," Cave says.

Also harrowingly formative to Cave's outlook was the AIDS crisis, which was at its deadly height while he was in graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in the late '80s. He became painfully aware of the function of denial in our culture, and the extent of people's unwillingness to see. "Watching my friends die played a big part in my perspective," he says. "In those moments, you have a choice to be in denial with them or to be present, to be the one to say, 'This is happening.' You have to make a decision to go through that process with them, to pick up their parents at the airport, to clean to get their apartments ready for their parents to stay. And then you have to say goodbye, and then they're gone, and you're packing up their belongings to send to their families. And then you're just left there in an empty apartment, not knowing what to feel." In a single year, he lost five friends and confronted his own mortality waiting for his test results. "Just — choosing not to be in denial in any circumstance," he says.

THE VULNERABILITY OF the black body in a historically white context is a subject generations of African-American artists have contended with, perhaps most iconically in Glenn Ligon's 1990 untitled etching, in which the phrase "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background," adapted from Zora Neale Hurston's 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," is printed over and over again in black stencil on a white canvas, the words blurring as they travel the length of the canvas. In her book "Citizen: An American Lyric" (2014), the poet Claudia Rankine, writing about Serena Williams, puts it this way: "The body has a memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness — all the unintimidated, unblinking and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games."

The individual body has a memory, and so do collective bodies, retaining a longer and longer list of names — Eric Garner on Staten Island, Michael Brown in Missouri, Trayvon Martin in Florida and so many more innocent black people who have suffered violence and death at the hands of police — within it. But that day in 1992, hurrying back to his studio with a cart full of twigs and setting out to build a sculpture from them, Cave had no idea that the result would be a garment. "At first, it didn't occur to me that I could wear it; I wasn't thinking about it." When he finally did put it on and moved around, it made a sound. "And that was the beginning," he says. "The sound was a way of alarming others to my presence. The suit became a suit of armor where I hid my identity. It was something 'other.' It was an answer to all of these things I had been thinking about: What do I do to protect my spirit in spite of all that's happening around me?" Throughout the Soundsuits' countless iterations, Cave has tinkered with their proportions, thinking about the shapes of power, constructing forms that recall a pope's miter or the head of a missile. Some of them are 10 feet tall.

But no matter their variations, these Soundsuit designs have always felt personal and unique, as if only Cave himself could have invented them. And yet he is also aware of how the pain he is addressing in these works is also written into our culture: There is a long lineage of casual cruelty that has shaped Cave's art. His 2014 installation at Jack Shainman Gallery, "Made by Whites for Whites," was inspired by an undated ceramic container Cave found in a flea market that, when pulled off the shelf, revealed itself to be the cartoonishly painted disembodied head of a black man. "Spittoon," read the label. Renting a cargo bay, Cave toured the country in search of the most racially charged memorabilia he could find. The centerpiece of the show, "Sacrifice," features a bronze cast of Cave's own hands and arms, holding another severed head, this one part of an old whack-a-mole type carnival game — simultaneously lending compassion to the object while implicating its beholder. Look, Cave is saying. If we're ever going to move past this hatred, we have to acknowledge what it is that produced it.

A collection of racially charged salt and pepper shakers that Cave found in a flea market and keeps in his studio. Renée Cox

"It's not that Nick doesn't have a dark side," Denise Markonish, the senior curator and managing director of exhibitions at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass., tells me. Markonish approached Cave in 2013 about planning an exhibition for the museum's largest gallery. "He wants to seduce you and punch you in the gut." The result, the artist's most ambitious seduction to date, was his 2016 show, "Until," a twist on the legal principle of innocence until guilt is proven. For it, Cave transformed the football-field-size room into a sinister wonderland, featuring a vast crystal cloudscape suspended 18 feet into the air made up of miles of crystals, thousands of ceramic birds, 13 gilded pigs and a fiberglass crocodile covered in large marbles. Accessible by ladder, the top of the cloud was studded with cast-iron lawn jockeys, all of them holding dream catchers. It's an apt and deeply unsettling vision of today's America, land of injustice and consumer plenty, distracted from yet haunted by all of the things it would prefer not to see.

While they were sourcing the materials for the show, Markonish tells me, they realized how expensive crystals are, and one of the curators, Alexandra Foradas, called Cave to ask if some of them could be acrylic. "He said, 'Oh, absolutely, 75 percent can be acrylic but the remaining 50 percent should be glass.' She said, 'Nick, that's 125 percent,' and without pausing he said, 'Exactly.'" After the show, Markonish asked Cave and Faust to create a graphic expression of the exhibition, which resulted in a tattoo on the inside of her index finger that reads "125%." "Of course, at that point, it wasn't about his use of material," she says, "but about his dedication and generosity. It was his idea to open up his exhibition to people from the community, to performers or for discussions about the difficult things he wants to talk about in his work."

One of those themes is the gun violence that has ravaged many black communities; Chicago, Cave's home of three decades, had more shooting victims (2,948) in 2018 than Los Angeles (1,008) and New York (897) combined, largely concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. (Cave had hoped to open Facility on Chicago's racially diverse West Side, only to run into intransigent zoning laws; he wants to find a permanent home there for "Until" and has art projects planned with the area's high schools.) Cave's most recent gallery show, "If a Tree Falls," which featured sculptural installations and opened at Jack Shainman Gallery in fall 2018, strikes a more somber, elegiac note than his previous work, juxtaposing body parts in bronze monochrome, including casts of his own arms emerging from the gallery walls, holding delicate flower bouquets, which suggest a sense of renewal, of hope and metamorphosis. He's now working on a new series of bronze sculptures, which include casts of his own hands, topped with cast tree branches, birds and flowers, the first of which is meant to debut at Miami's Art Basel in December. The sculptures will be on a much bigger scale — a human form made larger than life with embellishment, not unlike the Soundsuits in approach but with a new sense of gravity and monumentality (they are intended to be shown outdoors). The man famous for bringing a light touch to the heaviest of themes is, finally, stripping away the merry trappings and embracing the sheer weight of now.

"Arm Peace," part of a series of sculptures created for Cave's 2018 solo show, "If a Tree Falls," at Jack Shainman Gallery. Renée Cox

A detail of "Tondo" (2019). Renée Cox

When I ask Cave how he feels about the critical reception of his work — he is one of that select group of artists, like Jeff Koons or David Hockney, who is celebrated by both high art and popular culture — he tells me that he stopped reading his shows' reviews, but not because he's afraid of being misunderstood or underappreciated; instead, he seems to be objecting to a kind of critical passivity. "What I find peculiar is that no one really wants to get in there and talk about what's behind it all," he says. "It's not that I haven't put it out there. And I don't know why."

I push him to clarify: "Do you mean that a white reviewer of your show might explain that the work provides commentary on race and violence and history but won't extend that thinking any further, to his or her own cultural inheritance and privilege?"

"They may provide the context, but it doesn't go further. They're not providing any point of view or perspective, or sense of what they're receiving from this engagement. I just think it's how we exist in society," he replies.

Is art alone enough to shake us from our complacency? Two decades into a new millennium, these questions have fresh urgency: By turning away from stricken neighborhoods and underfunded schools, we've perpetuated the conditions of inequality and violence, effectively devaluing our own people. We've dimmed the very kind of 20th-century American dreaming that led so many of us, including Cave, to a life filled with possibility. Whether or not this can be reversed depends on our being able to look without judgment and walk without blinders, he believes. It means reassessing our own roles in the public theater. It means choosing not to be in denial or giving in to despair. It means seeing beyond the self to something greater.

"I just want everything to be fabulous," he tells me, as we part ways for the afternoon. "I want it to be beautiful, even when the subject is hard. Honey, the question is, how do you want to exist in the world, and how are you going to do the work?"