Art has largely banished its minor stepsiblings, such as caricature and the comic strip, from its entourage, thus David Hammons’s sense of humor makes him the exception among artists. In the 1980s, he marketed well-shaped quasi-serial snowballs in the street; more recently, he has taken to launching grand attacks against the art business in a recourse to Abstract Expressionism. On the occasion of our March issue, themed “Comedy,” which investigates the comedic in art and in mass-media formats such as TV series and films, we are republishing a text by Alexander Alberro from 2011 on David Hammons’s ironic commentary on lived experience of urban life in the US and on the operation of the contemporary art world.

For Hammons, art is a mischievous game beyond limits. It perverts the logic of forms of belief, conventions of knowledge, and ways of seeing, to make the repressed visible in a manner that only an excellent joke could accomplish.