At the Met Gala, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a white dress designed by Aurora James that read “Tax the Rich” on the back in a striking crimson. Tickets to the Gala, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s splashy yearly fundraiser, are $35,000, but Ocasio-Cortez was invited to the event as a guest of the museum. She did not attend at her own expense. The tickets are funded by corporate sponsors and designers, and the publishing conglomerate Condé Nast likely sponsored her seat given that she was seated at their table. In response to criticism of her choice to go rather than boycott the event, Ocasio-Cortez said her presence itself was a progressive, symbolic act of representation. Given that she was invited to this extremely selective and notoriously high-society event, it is difficult to estimate precisely how subversive the elite find Ocasio-Cortez’s stances to be. Politics bled into her fashion—literally, through blood-red text. Ultimately, though, the dress lacked power because it posed no specific threat to the economic structure that directly benefited attendees of the Gala. It was a performative, aesthetic choice. Ocasio-Cortez chose a seat at the linen-dressed table over challenging the respectability politics and self-serving interests of those seated around her.

While it is critical that our society become more supportive of women of color, mere presence in positions of power is tokenization. Art made by artists from marginalized backgrounds is being brought into the mainstream, but this platform is often provided in service of dominant structures of power. Some artists with platforms are tokenized by those in power because their art is not threatening to the status quo. Ocasio-Cortez’s dress and Amanda Gorman’s poetry are two such examples. 

Gorman, Los Angeles’ youth poet laureate, performed at President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January. Her poem “The Hill We Climb” fit fluidly into the event’s theme, “America United.” The poem included lines acknowledging past turbulence in the country, including, 

“We braved the belly of the beast / We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what ‘just’ is isn’t always justice / And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.” 

By using the past tense to refer to unspecified struggles, Gorman depoliticizes injustices in the United States in order to pull unity into focus. She acknowledges, “And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t striving to form a union that is perfect.” Ezra Pound once said that “poetry is news that stays news.” In her poem, Gorman actively relegates the problems of structural inequities to the past. She makes an intentional choice to praise the quest for unity and harmony. Because these values are foundational to the United States, they are not new in the sense that they are no longer radical. Of course, they were radical and revolutionary when first developed—which is not to say that they have ever come close to being realized. By Pound’s definition, then, Gorman’s poem might not exactly classify as poetry, but the founding documents of the nation certainly would. Aesthetics have often been used as a weapon by those without traditional political power in the United States. For Black women poets of every generation in this country, including many contemporary artists, speech has been a tool to highlight difference and discrimination. Gorman’s message is one of conformity, not of revolution.

The sight of a young woman reciting into a microphone, head-to-toe in Prada, contrasts sharply with one hungry guerrilla artist spray-painting tunnels and street corners. Jean-Michel Basquiat was an Afro-Latino artist active throughout the 1980s until his death in 1988. His paintings radically displaced economic, social, and racial hierarchies, but have been been commodified and co-opted by those actually being critiqued. His painting Equals Pi was used in a Tiffany & Co advertisement featuring Beyoncé and Jay-Z this year. Basquiat may have enjoyed the prestige of being featured in the ad—he never shied away from the spotlight, being celebrated in Manhattan’s art world, and making connections with prominent figures like Andy Warhol. He may also have disliked the privatization of his art, as the medium of graffiti was central to his work. Even the pieces he painted on canvas all retained the same aesthetic as his street art—capitalized words and phrases, simple drawings of particular symbols, acrylic and oil paint used to resemble spray paint. His work was urgently political, largely revolving around class difference and racial injustice.

In 1982, Basquiat painted Obnoxious Liberals. In his typical style, he uses color, symbols, and short phrases to develop a complex world. The cowboy hat and dollar signs on one side cause the dark figure on the other side to feel trapped. This figure stands with his arms chained, but even so, his hands are in clenched fists, holding darts. In the center of the painting is a man in a top hat, like Uncle Sam or perhaps Mister Monopoly, and above him are the words OBNOXIOUS LIBERALS alongside a copyright sign. The man’s shirt says NOT FOR SALE, as if to contrast with the obvious interchangeability of the prisoner. The perpetrator of harm is mainstream American culture. The liberal contributes to the harmful, greedy culture harming the prisoner. It is not just the conservative forces of overt oppression which harm marginalized groups. Basquiat communicates that it is important to be wary of those who co-opt progressivism, too.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z, for their part, have welcomed Equals Pi with open arms. Basquiat has come to symbolize wealth and status—ironically the values he critiqued most often in his paintings. In 2017, though, a Basquiat painting made history as the most expensive American painting ever sold, fetching over $110 million at auction. The Tiffany campaign features a quote from the Carters: “Love is the diamond that the jewelry and art decorate,” which reads as genuinely nonsensical to me but clearly prioritizes art to the same extent as displays of wealth like diamonds.

Next year, Tiffany will hang Equals Pi in their flagship store. This display is sure to cement the status of Basquiat, a poor Black street artist who critiqued the bourgeoisie in nearly every single one of his paintings, as a posthumous status symbol. The ultimately hollow art embraced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Amanda Gorman aligns with the aims of obnoxious liberals, and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings have been deradicalized to serve the same purpose. These examples show that we must move beyond complacency with the mere politics of representation in order to actually engage with art that destabilizes our current systems of power. While in high school, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz collaborated on graffiti art under the tag SAMO. In 1980, Basquiat announced the end of SAMO with the tag “SAMO© IS DEAD.” This public statement, in a sense, was opposite of the death of the group, because it was highly visible. However, the actual death was found in the end of the group; its contribution had ended. In the same way now, Basquiat’s art is dead because of its visibility. It was once news, but it is no longer new.