“I will die for the truth and that’s what’s closest to art,” Kanye West told the crowd at a screening of his Steve McQueen-directed film project All Day/I Feel Like That at the LA County Museum of Art at the weekend. “I’m a bad celebrity, but a pretty good artist,” was the self-assessment he offered attendees, including his wife Kim Kardashian, in a chat with LACMA CEO Michael Govan after the film was shown.
Kanye teamed up with 12 Years A Slave director Steve McQueen after they met by chance at London’s Dover Street Market. In praise of McQueen’s work on the Oscar-winning film, Kanye said, “He was able to bend genres, and that’s one of our biggest challenges now”; adding that, “It’s amazing we met in an apparel place because that’s one of the genres I’m trying to bend,” referring to his forays into fashion design.
The 9-minute, single-take film was shot in the south east of England and explores what Kanye describes as “the war of perception”. The film screening was accompanied by text on the gallery wall that read: “As in the meeting between the bull and the matador, it remains unclear who chases whom in the arena. The roles of the pursuer and pursued are at times inverted.” In the film, Kanye and the camera perform the alternating roles of the bull and matador, with McQueen saying the approach he took was akin to “having binoculars one way and turning them around the other way”.