Artist Contextualized

“When scientific learning began to eclipse religion as the more reliable explainer of the mysteries of life, our view of the world flattened out — we went from looking to the sky for answers, to looking here on earth. In the absence of divine authority, our perspective, individual human perspective, became as important as anything else. Picasso was able to see this, with his crazy giant eyes, more clearly than other people. And so began to paint the world exactly as he saw it — as a collection of two-dimensional geometric shapes, like planes of broken glass, splintered and warped and shifting with the viewer’s relative position to the object in sight. The world, as Picasso painted it, didn’t look like anything people had seen before. But in a certain way, it was closer to the truth, as people had started to experience it, maybe without anyone even knowing it. He was showing people what was inside themselves, showing them the future.

That’s what it felt like to watch Kanye perform ‘New Slaves’ on Saturday Night Live last month.”
 — Dave Bry goes there.