Hamishi Farah at Maxwell Graham / Essex Street

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It's a hard press release to beat. One can only be more explicit. In gaming, "the meta" is the strategy created by players using knowledge of the inner workings of the game mechanics. For something like chess, "playing the meta" is axiomatic to the game, whereas for a role playing game, a certain suspension of disbelief is required, and "playing the meta" is frowned upon. Since Art is our collective cloud based MMORPG, it is a game requiring its players to pretend like they aren't playing the meta - like they didn't lick the curator's cheeks clean after dinner. Like their abstractions are of conceptual merit. We know art's function and follow that to its form. Broodthaers aside, artists acknowledging the meta is tongue in cheek - Krebber or contingent painting or whatever. But Art's meta was basically laid out by Bourdieu and everyone kind of just steps around this like they stepped around the rich but racist patron until recently it became more meta advantageous to call them out publicly. The meta is always up for debate. The point is, "black portraiture has been through an intense though not unprecedented revaluation in recent years" and that was white's first move. Black to move next. And since we know art's inner function can predict the form, and lo: Farah makes that obvious move, Black Painting. Farah does what he does best, the politics self represent. The exchange in chess, in art, is a foregone conclusion. It's the stupid, brazenly open transaction, of seeing the pawn offered, being taken, that makes it fun.

See too: Hamishi Farah at Fri Art

Hamishi Farah at Fri Art

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Pusha T and Drake's longstanding beef ended with Drake having to release a statement admitting, yes, he was hiding a child and, yes, that was him in blackface. It exploded. People said Pusha took it too far. Drake vocally conceding the beef would have been less of an L than his hand forced in apology.  Beef was supposed to remain in the land of publicity grabbing headlines, in hyperreality, in the game. I.e. Children, etc., shouldn't be involved. Farah's own "going nuclear" would also involve children that should maybe be left out of the game's foibles. Do you see where this is going? For those seeking beef's reportage: After Schutz excused her razzle dazzled murdered black child through her relation as a mother, Farrah, no stranger to surgical summer, painted Schutz's child. It exploded. Farah's painting of the child was censored in Monopol, labeled an "act of revenge" (language seemingly no German paper used to describe Schutz's painting of someone else's child.) The jujitsu here is black belt. Returning all the stakes of painting - that artists are quick to claim in the same breath they claim to be outside of - into the real. The virtual sacrosanct of poised conceptuality - "in the game" of hyperreality - Farah is all too canny in, happy to, throw into the artistically hot water it supposedly was already boiling. Basically, if you want stakes in art, here are your stakes. This is isn't conceptual, these are people's lives, not necessarily all in the game. Not a game. Farah, reasonably, has beef. And there is more of it. His instagram, @merlincarpenter, documents another beef with none other than. Carpenter's once conceptually excused racist joke, that he seemingly would prefer to disappear, Farah continuously drags back into the mud of the real. 

Choosing a side in a beef is always part of the fun. And your choice here is going come with political questions on the limits of art's unquestioned terrain, stakes, Debord, and how much hyper faux reality we can take from rappers. But I fucking hate Drake.