Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death

A groundbreaking video collage by artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa (b. 1960), built around Kanye West’s gospel-infused hip-hop hit “Ultralight Beam.” For nearly eight minutes, Jafa immerses the viewer in a cascade of African-American experiences, drawn from home videos, YouTube clips, news footage, and archival material. Iconic figures appear among the anonymous faces and street scenes, including Martin Luther King Jr, James Baldwin, Barack Obama, Beyoncé, Miles Davis, and LeBron James.

Jafa’s inventive montage alternates dance, music, and sports with religious ecstasy and scenes of police violence and civil rights protests, in a powerful and confronting evocation of celebration and resilience, trauma, and racial oppression.

Now regarded as a contemporary masterpiece of video art, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death has been exhibited in renowned museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Smithsonian. In June 2020, it was streamed online simultaneously for two days by 13 museums across seven countries, in response to the global Black Lives Matter protests.