Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In 2012 Makode Linde displayed an extremely controversial work of art at the Modern Museum in Stockholm. It comprised the artist, who is an Afro-Swedish man, adorned in blackface as the head of a cake in the shape of a caricatured black woman. When viewers cut into the cake, the artist let out piercing screams, referencing FGM. The piece was part of the artist’s project ‘Afromantics’, which uses blackface imagery on Western icons. An international uproar followed, and the event was reported to the Parliamentary Ombudsman. In this talk, I present an account of what I call the ‘aesthetic slur’. Similar in kind to Patricia Hill Collins’s ‘controlling images’, I will delineate images which behave in much the same way as slurs, analysing particularly their feature of ‘effluence’; how their harmful content can leak out and not be insulated by intention or context. I will then use this analysis to explain what went wrong with Painful Cake.