really the rap game looks a lot like the art game
shout out hyperallergic for giving me some space to write about the new book. quick excerpt:
In her original Japanese edition [of the autobiography], Kusama refers to the area in New York where she used to live transforming into a “slum,” with real estate prices “falling by $5 a day.” She attributes this to “black people shooting each other out front, and homeless people sleeping there.”
When the English translation of Infinity Net came out in 2011, this sentence was missing. It was not a mistranslation. The rest of the paragraph was intact; only the sentence about Black and unhoused people was deleted.
At the time, I was unsure what to make of this omission. However, after reading 1945 to Now, I’m starting to think that this was an early sign of a strategy to subtly sanitize Kusama for Western audiences, reinventing her so as to improve her marketability.
more here: