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Daniel Joseph Martinez had an operatic title for the museum tags he had made forthe Whitney Museum of American Arts Biennial: Museum Tags: Second Movement(overture); or, Overture con Claque (Overture with Hired Audience Members).Thelittle tags were a compression of everything he had been thinking about. Perhapsthey also compressed everything else his fellow insurgents had been thinking about.

They read:

I CANTIMAGINEEVER WANTINGTO BEWHITE

To the traditionalists fearful of Biennial curator Thelma Goldens contention that thecenter was giving way to the margins, the tags might have seemed like mereantiassimilationist chest-thumping. But Martinez was tapping into a debate thatdated 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 andunique Negro art merely flattered racists and patronized Blacks. Langston Hugheshad replied:

[T]o my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts anyduties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that oldwhispering I want to be white, hidden in the aspirations of his people, toWhy should I want to be white? I am a Negroand beautiful!1

Hughes would further unpack these ideas in two of his most famous poems, LetAmerica Be America Again and I, Too. In the latter, the poems protagonist dreamsof 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:

Theyll see how beautiful I amAnd be ashamed

I, too, am America.2

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

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less white than ever? What might it say for anyone to wear a tag that said To Be orImagine?

The tags were signifiers floating through the galleries, orchestrating operaticmovements of big ideas and personalities. They opened up to endless

interpretations, unforeseen interactions and reactions. When some of the securityguardsthe overwhelming majority of whom were of colorchose to wear one, two orseveral tags at once, a minor management-labor kerfuffle over uniform protocolbroke out in which Martinez and the curatorial staff had to intervene. The tagsdemocratized the museum a little. At the end of the day, everyone in the museumcould go home with the taga work of art transacted for $6 or a work shift. Theycould collect them like baseball cards or Basquiat drawings.

The tags had elegance and symmetrysubversions within subversions, loops withinloops of meaning. Martinez mused, We know art affects people, but it affects tenpeople at a time, maybe. Its a very slow burn. And I was interested in testing. Thiswas 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 speedof sound.

And it was just absolutely perfect.

He had been warned not to do them. As the Biennial had neared, big New Yorkgalleries were calling, wanting to represent Martinez. At the prestigious VeniceBiennale, he was showing beautiful paintings of white oil on black velvet depictingthe arrests of the Red Brigade and tagged with Situationist phrases. A big CornellUniversity commission was coming up. Over a decade after leaving CalArts he hadbecome 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 andnoncommercial. They werent beautiful. They werent pleasurable. They would stophis career in its tracks. He told them he could not be passive.

Martinezs tags began the Whitney Biennial and ended it. They summarizedeverything that people loved or hated about the show. They were the arrival of newmessages from new voices, representations of an increasingly complex world. Or theywere 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 calledthem racistrepresentative 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 Criticsasked David A. Ross how he would have felt if a Black Muslim artist from Crown

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