We have been tracing a contest of images within the United States that falls along racial, class, geographic, ideological, and party-political lines. Most of the time, these social divisions remain multiplicitous, not quite coalescing into the kind of generalized partisan divides and armed conflict that characterize full-scale civil war. Yet, the media campaigns orchestrated around Donald Trump, and the protests following the circulation of the video of George Floyd's murder, highlighted contrasting aspects of what might be called the cultural phase of such a war. So did January 6, 2021, when considered as a peak action within a concerted campaign by supporters of Trumpism determined to “Stop the Steal.” In both cases, mass media events were staged with the intent of effecting direct political change. In the United States and everywhere else during recent decades, the game has changed. The iconomy has become intensely politicized. And politics has become intensely iconomic.

Control of the circulation of images has always been important in any struggle for political advantage. Today, their saturation of most aspects everyday life means that they also occupy its extraordinary moments, those that connect us or threaten to abruptly disconnect us. We have been tracing the kinds of control over image circulation exercised by the social media companies, by governments of all kinds, by certain religions, by legal systems, and by dominant economic agendas, notably that of neoliberal capitalism and its recent centralized, statist variants. In the previous chapters, we also tracked the widespread emergence of strategies of contracirculation, and of engendering diversification, especially among activists who are building campaigns that resist these systems and envisage alternatives. This chapter will focus on the contribution to these strategies of artists, particularly Black artists, working with these widely circulating images to show why and how Black lives matter.

The “Political” Biennial

In New York in 1993, George Holliday's video of the beating of Rodney King was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial of that year as a work of art. Curator John G. Hanhardt saw it as such, as formally aligned with the examples of contemporary avant-garde and experimental video that he was showing in his section of the exhibition.