With all the phenomenal activity he has had under his belt in recent time: a major collaboration with The New York Library, as well as, an artist residency in Italy, New York-native provocateur SHIRT has been adamant about making a bold statement with the release of his latest single: “Death To Wall Art.”
Backed by Mello Music Group, SHIRT teams up with GRAMMY Award winning producer Jack Splash to cultivate “Death To Wall Art” alongside an entire bevy of poignant tracks that are expected to accompany a complete project by the end of the year.
Known for his extreme risk taking and notorious alt-thought process within the contemporary world of art, SHIRT has made a conspicuous knack out of combatting the status quo via the conduits of music, video, text, photography, performance and more.
Equipped with his MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) from an academy in Basel, Switzerland, SHIRT has established himself as a premier purveyor of artistic engagement across the globe.
In 2019, SHIRT took part in a group exhibition entitled: “I’m Coming But I May Not Use The Front Door” at Helmhaus Museum in Zurich, Switzerland.
Amid this previous summer season, SHIRT made waves as an artist-in-residence at the highly prestigious Civitella Ranieri. During his stint, he focused on recording incisive, thought-provoking raps for two months in a Castle in Italy.
Similar to the high-level impact of his other artistic endeavors, “Death To Wall Art” is a canvas that SHIRT uses to elicit his commentary on the modern-day state of art with fervor and urgency.
Over low-fi, gritty, relatively ominous instrumentation, SHIRT vents his personal frustrations with multiple facets of the art world, some of which include cosmic capitalism and late-stage capitalism to undervalued artists and art that has been deemed “not fine art” by racially motivated “traditional” standards.
In one of his insightful lines, he states:
“If we being real nobody want to call it art. They’d have to open their museum doors – it’d fall apart.”
What SHIRT is really trying to illuminate is the bleak reality that Hip-Hop music has and continues to be excluded from the highest echelons of the Fine Art world.
For the average rapper, this might be too intricate or enigmatic to dissect but for SHIRT, this is genuinely at the core of his purpose.
In another instance, SHIRT states:
“When I say ‘death to wall art’, I mean f**k paint by numbers. That’s a hallmark. Don’t just color out the lines, tear the wall art. Don’t just show me a corny NFT of the shark, go swim with sharks.”
With his fierce rhetoric, he is making a fervent attempt at dismantling the malevolent forces that perpetuate discrimination within the modern art landscape.
“Death of Wall Art” is a powerful vignette of what’s wrong with today’s world of art but more importantly, a sonic blueprint on the tangible measures that can be done to rectify these issues once and for all.
To keep up with SHIRT, check him out on Instagram
To listen to “Death of Wall Art,” check it out on BandCamp
Photos Courtesy of The Artist SHIRT