Daniel Joseph Martinez had an operatic title for the museum tags he had made for

the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial: Museum Tags: Second Movement
(overture); or, Overture con Claque (Overture with Hired Audience Members). The
little tags were a compression of everything he had been thinking about. Perhaps
they also compressed everything else his fellow insurgents had been thinking about.

They read:

I CAN’T
IMAGINE
EVER WANTING
TO BE
WHITE

To the traditionalists fearful of Biennial curator Thelma Golden’s contention that the
center was giving way to the margins, the tags might have seemed like mere
antiassimilationist chest-thumping. But Martinez was tapping into a debate that
dated back long before “Black Is Beautiful” buttons.

In the June 1926 issue of The Nation, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance,
George Schuyler argued that the notion of cultural difference and a separate and
unique “Negro art” merely flattered racists and patronized Blacks. Langston Hughes
had replied:

[T]o my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any
duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old
whispering “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspirations of his people, to
“Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful!”1

Hughes would further unpack these ideas in two of his most famous poems, “Let
America Be America Again” and “I, Too.” In the latter, the poem’s protagonist dreams
of the day he is no longer sent back to eat his meal in the kitchen when guests arrive,
but offered a seat at the dinner table. He concludes:

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.2

Martinez was not dwelling on this history. Instead he thought of the tags as tiny
codes, Saussurian signifiers pressed into tinplate-steel. What did it mean for a young
urban white boy to wear a tag that read “White” when he was growing up in a culture

1
 Langston  Hughes,  “The  Negro  Artist  and  the  Racial  Mountain,”  Nation  122:3181  (June  23,  1926),  694.  
2
 Langston  Hughes,  “I,  Too,”  in  Arnold  Rampersad,  ed.,  The  Collected  Poems  of  Langston  Hughes  (New  
York:  Vintage  Books,  2004),  46.  
less white than ever? What might it say for anyone to wear a tag that said “To Be” or
“Imagine”?

The tags were signifiers floating through the galleries, orchestrating operatic
movements of big ideas and personalities. They opened up to endless
interpretations, unforeseen interactions and reactions. When some of the security
guards—the overwhelming majority of whom were of color—chose to wear one, two or
several tags at once, a minor management-labor kerfuffle over uniform protocol
broke out in which Martinez and the curatorial staff had to intervene. The tags
democratized the museum a little. At the end of the day, everyone in the museum
could go home with the tag—a work of art transacted for $6 or a work shift. They
could collect them like baseball cards or Basquiat drawings.

The tags had elegance and symmetry—subversions within subversions, loops within
loops of meaning. Martinez mused, “We know art affects people, but it affects ten
people at a time, maybe. It’s a very slow burn. And I was interested in testing. This
was a test, an experiment, right? How could I speed that up? Could I just like, slam!”
He clapped one hand forward off the other. “Like, salt flats! I wanna break the speed
of sound.”

“And it was just absolutely perfect.”

He had been warned not to do them. As the Biennial had neared, big New York
galleries were calling, wanting to represent Martinez. At the prestigious Venice
Biennale, he was showing beautiful paintings of white oil on black velvet depicting
the arrests of the Red Brigade and tagged with Situationist phrases. A big Cornell
University commission was coming up. Over a decade after leaving CalArts he had
become one of the hottest names in the art world. But when Martinez showed his
ideas for the tags, gallerists were aghast. These things were alienating and
noncommercial. They weren’t beautiful. They weren’t pleasurable. They would stop
his career in its tracks. He told them he could not be passive.

Martinez’s tags began the Whitney Biennial and ended it. They summarized
everything that people loved or hated about the show. They were the arrival of new
messages from new voices, representations of an increasingly complex world. Or they
were an artless one-liner delivered at the expense of the art-world elite.

One critic called the tags “hostile,” another “a ritual of humiliation,” two more called
them “racist”—representative of a show that had been as delightful as a hive of
buzzing hornets, as deep as twelve syllables, as disposable as a museum tag.3 Critics
asked David A. Ross how he would have felt if a Black Muslim artist from Crown

3
 Deborah  Solomon,  “A  Showcase  for  Political  Correctness,”  Wall  Street  Journal,  March  5,  1993.  See  also  
John  Taylor,  “Mope  Art:  Deconstructing  the  Biennial,”  New  York,  March  22,  1993;  Richard  Caseby,  “PC—or  
Racism?”,  The  Sunday  Times,  April  4,  1993;  Bill  Van  Siclen,  “Get  the  Message?”,  Providence  Journal,  March  
28,  1993.  
Heights had done tags that read, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be Jewish.”4 Arthur
Danto wrote, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to have had anything to do with the 1993
Biennial.”5

4
 Ross  answered,  “It  couldn’t  have  been  done  because  it  wouldn’t  have  been  about  the  position  of  
dominance.”  Peter  Plagens  and  Carolyn  Friday,  “From  Hopper  to  Hip-­‐Hop,”  Newsweek.  November  8,  
1993,  76.  
5
 He  later  recanted.  And  Danto  praised  Martinez’s  tags  in  a  retrospective  book  of  his  work.  The  tags,  
Danto  later  said,  revealed  Martinez  not  so  much  as  an  activist  but  as  “an  anti-­‐formalist,  making  an  art  
whose  force  and  meaning  did  not  rest  upon  getting  the  design  formally  right.”  Arthur  Danto,  “Daniel  
Joseph  Martinez’s  Museum  Tags  as  Anti-­‐formal  Performances,”  in  Daniel  Joseph  Martinez:  A  Life  of  
Disobedience  (Ostfildern,  Germany:  Hatje  Canz,  2009),  201.