The Missed Conversation
When 133.5 million viewers tuned into Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX halftime performance in New Orleans, they watched what will likely be remembered as one of the most deliberately composed visual experiences ever broadcast on American television. Yet the critical conversation that followed got almost entirely swallowed up by the usual questions: Did he perform the hits? Was the setlist tight? How many dancers were there? These are questions sports journalists ask about concerts, not questions art critics ask about coordinated visual statements.
The frustration isn’t with people asking conventional questions. It’s with the broader infrastructure of how we talk about culture at all. A performance this deliberately constructed, this rooted in specific art historical references, this carefully engineered in its visual language, deserved a fundamentally different kind of analysis. Instead, it got treated as a promotional vehicle and a cultural moment, when it should have been understood as a commissioned public artwork.
That distinction matters. When we don’t recognize something as art, we don’t apply the intellectual tools needed to understand it. We lose the vocabulary, the historical context, the comparative framework that reveals what we’re actually looking at.
The Architecture of Intention
Start with the stage itself. Designer Es Devlin, who also orchestrated the visual language of the 2012 London Olympics closing ceremony, built a towering structure using 2,400 individually programmable LED panels. This wasn’t set design as backdrop. This was the artwork as primary subject matter.
The structure referenced the Watts Towers of Los Angeles, a series of sculptural constructions built by Sabato Rodia between 1921 and 1954 in one of the city’s most economically marginalized neighborhoods. That reference wasn’t incidental decoration. The Watts Towers occupy a specific and contested space in American art history. They exist outside the institutional gallery system. They were created by an immigrant laborer without formal training. They represent a model of artistic creation rooted in place, community, and persistence rather than credentialing and access.
By structuring the halftime stage around this architectural precedent, Lamar and Devlin were making a deliberate statement about whose aesthetic lineages matter and whose don’t. They were saying that Rodia’s informal, community-rooted creative practice was a legitimate framework for understanding contemporary art making. You could spend an hour in a graduate seminar unpacking the implications of that choice alone.
The Color Theory That Nobody Discussed
Then there’s the visual palette. The color choices weren’t arbitrary aesthetic decisions. Artforum’s March 2025 halftime show analysis identified direct citations of Afrofuturist color theory as outlined in scholar Kodwo Eshun’s 1998 text “More Brilliant Than the Sun.” This is a specific, traceable intellectual genealogy. Eshun’s work theorizes how color and sonic architecture function together in Black futurist aesthetics, how they create alternative temporalities and possibilities.
The show’s chromatic language wasn’t casually mimicking Eshun’s ideas. It was engaging with them rigorously. The LED panels moved through color sequences that didn’t follow conventional color harmony or television production aesthetics. They created temporal disruptions, moments where the color felt slightly wrong or displaced. This is what happens when a visual artist takes up critical theory as a creative constraint.
Most viewers didn’t register this. Most television commentators certainly didn’t. But if you’ve read Eshun, if you understand the lineage of Afrofuturist visual practice, if you’re watching for that particular language, it’s unmistakable. The show was operating on multiple frequencies simultaneously: one for a mass audience and one for viewers fluent in a specific critical vocabulary.
Pulitzer Prize Composers and the Legitimacy Question
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill called the performance “the most coherent piece of public visual art America has produced in a decade” in a February 2025 interview with The New Yorker. This wasn’t hyperbole or casual praise. Threadgill is a rigorous artist working at the highest levels of contemporary composition. His endorsement was intellectual, not promotional.
What’s interesting about Threadgill’s assessment is what it reveals about how artistic legitimacy actually works in America. A Pulitzer Prize composer saying something is important art doesn’t automatically make it register as important art in the broader culture. It gets filtered through the same mass media apparatus that treats the performance primarily as entertainment. The institutional validation exists, but it runs in a separate channel from the dominant cultural conversation.
This structural problem deserves more attention than it usually gets. We have the critical language, the analytical frameworks, the intellectual validation. What we lack is a media culture willing to present those frameworks as central rather than supplementary to how we understand major cultural events.
The Merchandise as Document
Even the commercial tie-ins functioned as part of the artwork’s logic. Nike released a limited “Not Like Us” Air Force 1 collaboration that sold out in under eight minutes. By Q3 2025, resale prices on StockX averaged around $480 per pair. This wasn’t just successful product design. It was a commentary on how artworks function within late capitalism, how aesthetic value converts into financial value, how limited editions create artificial scarcity that replicates the economics of the art market.
The speed of the sellout, the resale dynamics, the entire commodity lifecycle — this is part of what the show was examining. We live in an era where the boundary between art object, performance, and consumer product has become almost meaningless. Rather than lamenting this or pretending it doesn’t exist, Es Devlin’s studio has consistently engaged with it directly. The sneaker collaboration wasn’t a distraction from the art. It was an extension of what the art was about.
What We Actually Witnessed
So what was Sunday night, really? It was a coordinated visual statement that engaged with art historical precedent, critical theory, architectural history, and contemporary economics simultaneously. A work that understood its mass audience but refused to make that audience the sole target of its communication. It created nested systems of meaning that operated at different registers depending on what the viewer brought to the experience.
That’s not entertainment. That’s not even performance in the conventional sense. That’s a commissioned public artwork that happened to be broadcast to 133.5 million people. The fact that we don’t have a stable critical framework for discussing it says more about the limitations of our current cultural infrastructure than it does about the work itself.
If you watched the show and felt like something unusual was happening, that you were seeing different registers of meaning operating at once, that the visual language felt deliberate in a way that went beyond typical concert production — you were right. What you were watching deserved art criticism, not entertainment journalism. The question now is whether we’re willing to build the critical muscle to make those distinctions more consistently and more publicly.