Is Kanye West’s Recent Heel-Turn Actually Perfomance Art?
There’s a new wrinkle in the Kanye West insanity tour with Twitter user @Snowcone965 presenting a very plausible argument that West’s current heel-turn is actually a piece of performance art inspired by Andy Kaufman, Joseph Beuys and David Hammons.
Get your tinfoil hats and red string, I’ve got a conspiracy theory: @kanyewest is in the middle of a performance art piece and the clues are right in front of us. A thread:
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
1. First we need to establish who @DenimTears is. Forgive me if this is well known info, I’m not great at keeping up with every celebrity. His name is Tremaine Emory. He’s a collaborator and friend of Kanye. pic.twitter.com/aI0S5SUUMU
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
2) last night Kanye tweeted this picture. This appears to be Tremaine at the table. We also know from a previous tweet from Tremaine that he’s in Calabasas, where Kanye lives. pic.twitter.com/w3OKmN5QTs
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
3) Kanye also mentioned in his interview with @cthagod “my boy Tremaine tweeted…” so we can assume that he’s both friends with Tremaine and looks at his Twitter account. I promise this info will be important coming up.
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
4. A week or so after rejoining twitter, Kanye tweeted these images on 4/22. The first two images involve David Hammons and the third and fourth involve Joseph Beuys. pic.twitter.com/Q1NdrXq91J
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
5. So let’s start with the first two images involving David Hammons. After Kanye tweeted these images, Tremaine quote tweeted them with this emoji: ♠️. I believe this is referring to Hammons work which aimed to “turn racist cliches (spade) on its head.” pic.twitter.com/HF0Qaqjcxd
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
6. As for the other two images of Joseph Beuys- the image Kanye tweeted was from an art installation Beuys did in 1974 called I Like America and America Likes Me, where he locked himself into a room with a coyote for 3 days.
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
7. The purpose of this performance with a coyote, “a wild spirit – often thought of as America’s untamed spirit” was to hopefully make the coyote “tolerant and accepting through Beuys’ desire to heal.” pic.twitter.com/Z6NYJapmwL
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
Are you following along so far? Kanye is friends with Tremaine Emory, who tweeted a spade emoji in response to Kanye West tweeting about performance artists Joseph Beuys and David Hammons. Beuys locked himself in a room with a coyote as a performance on healing racism by taming the coyote with the power of love. It’s some next-level Sailor Moon stuff, but done well before Sailor Moon was a thing.
8. I believe Kanye is doing a modern take on Beuys piece with the coyote. He’s embraced what might be considered the coyote of today. Gotten close to it. Trump, Candace Owens, Alt Right. Maybe he sees this as a better chance to “tame” the coyote than more traditional methods.
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
9. But would Kanye get called out for doing something that’s already been done or taking someone else’s idea(s)? Maybe not if he explained himself first… pic.twitter.com/7Dl2PXJVrM
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
10. To me, there are two clues that are most important. The first one is this tweet from Kanye. This picture, posted six days after the others, again shows Beuys, Hammons, and now introduces what appears to be a drawing of Andy Kaufman. pic.twitter.com/Yr26mtdnOe
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
11. Anyone that’s even a little familiar with Andy Kaufman knows that he was a performance artist who would put himself in uncomfortable situations in wide view of the public eye, and rarely, if ever, break character. Check out Man on The Moon or Jim and Andy on Netflix.
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
Here’s the heart of the theory. If you combine Kanye’s love of these artists, along with Andy Kaufman, his tweets about originality being overrated, which I assumed just meant he liked the recent Marvel movies, and his recent behavior hanging out with people like Candice Owens, you could reasonably assume West is recreating I Like America and America Likes Me with alt-right shitheads in the role of the coyote.
15. The other most important clue in all of this was Tremaine’s response to this Kanye tweet. Tremaine quote tweeted it with the caption “The prestige ♠️🤹🏾♂️🤠🤼♂️.” pic.twitter.com/xll9MC5ekC
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
16. Maybe I’m reaching here, but I think ♠️ represents the MAGA hat, a symbol of perceived racism. 🤹🏾♂️ could represent Kanye pulling a trick, or maybe juggling a lot of things. 🤠 represents taming the coyote, and 🤼♂️ represents Kaufman.
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
17. Going with the theory that 🤹🏾♂️ represents pulling a trick, that could give some context to “The prestige.” Possibly a direct reference to the movie in which the prestige is the final act of a magic trick. pic.twitter.com/3BM1MA0L4R
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
18. Another quick note on “The Prestige”- this is something Tremaine has tweeted a few times. He tweeted it 45 minutes after the infamous picture of Kanye in the MAGA hat.
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
That is a bit of an unusual response to a tweet from Emory. “The Prestige” doesn’t really have an alternate meaning, it’s not like Kanye is getting a lot of accolades for palling around with the MAGA idiots.
I’ve come across another large clue to support my theory. Tremaine tweeted “let’s play twister, let’s play risk, yeah yeah yeah” which is a lyrics from REM’s Man on The Moon which is about Andy Kaufman and believing everything you see. pic.twitter.com/q39t1nBBmy
— Snowcone (@Snowcone989) May 2, 2018
I kind of like the idea that Kanye and Emory are going with the long troll here. I can’t guess what the end goal is here, but Kanye has really shown how willing everyone has been to entirely change their view of Kanye West because he said some things about politics they liked or disliked.
Kanye is a musician and shoe salesman, not a candidate for the Senate, so why do we actually care if he likes Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders? Does it change his music? It must, because all these right-wingers who were calling West’s rap trash a few weeks ago are rushing out to buy his albums today, and people who called him a genius don’t want to listen to his new music.
Also, this does track with Kanye. He has said he’s a fan of performance art and if there’s thing that’s easy to gather about Kanye is he doesn’t want to be known as a great musician, he wants to be considered a serious artist and genius whom people respect for his ideas. And if it isn’t true, well, we just gave Yeezy a huge out when he wants to come back to his senses and resume his normal life.