Candace Owens, no stranger to intense criticism for her bizarre hot takes, is facing online backlash again this week after releasing a video in which she bashes Taylor Swift's music.
In the video, titled Taylor Swift’s Music is Not Good, Owens took 8 whole minutes to criticize Swift's supposed lack of artistic ability, "modern art" and even Queen Bey herself.
She claimed artists like Swift are "too big to fail" and wasn't satisfied just ridiculing Swift, she decided to throw Beyoncé under the bus too. Owens said Beyoncé's recent album Renaissance was "anything but a renaissance."
Rapper and designer Ye's new BFF said both artists—both with rocky histories with Ye 🤔—were simply riding their old popularity to boost their new projects.
"Like Beyoncé, she hasn’t had a good studio album in a while."
"The last two or three Taylor Swift albums have been objectively very bad but she does not know that because no one tells her that."
Owens also had to condemn "modern art" in general—not content to vilify just Beyoncé and Swift's music.
"Modern art is really, really bad. It’s awful, actually. It’s not art at all."
"What it really is is this tremendous effort to convince you that dog sh*t is food. That's really what's happened now."
The "porcelain urinal" comment came from this same line of thinking.
Owens cited a line from an article in Daily Art Magazine about toilet-related art installations titled "Weird & Bizarre: A Toilet as a Work of Art" where the author discussed several toilet-based artworks and installations.
She said after bringing up Swift's lyrics:
"This is supposed to be deep and we’re supposed to think about it. Of course, the journalists love to describe it as cryptic and there’s some deep message that’s in here."
"So if you’re not getting it, because you shouldn’t be getting it because it makes no sense, actually the problem is you for not seeing how deep the porcelain urinal is—because this is porcelain urinal for music."
You can see Owens' commentary here:
Taylor Swift's Music Is Not Good www.youtube.com
Twitter seemed to largely disagree with Owens.
Some questioned what metrics she was using to declare Swift's music "objectively bad."
Others recognized a trend of right-wing commentators piling on to Swift.
Some questioned the timing of Owens' video, given the recent announcement Ye was acquiring alt-right social media app Parler—whose CEO is Owens' husband George Farmer.
Even the people who didn't really like Swift's new album criticized Owens for her hot take.
Owens incorrectly stated a "porcelain urinal" was featured at the Guggenheim Museum—most likely referring to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, which was part of Duchamp's Readymade series in which he chose intentionally ordinary manufactured objects to define as art. While some of Duchamp's art is part of the Guggenheim's collection, Fountain is not among those pieces.
A fully-functioning solid 18 karat gold toilet, a piece titled America by Maurizio Cattelan, was indeed featured at the Guggenheim from 2016 to 2017 though. The piece was sadly stolen from Blenheim Palace in 2019 and has not been recovered.
Owens cited a line from the article as a reason that "modern art" is ridiculous—completely ignoring the intent of her source to explore the weirdness of toilets as art.
The partial sentence Owens cited as endorsing toilets as "art":
"you will be pleasantly surprised how a toilet can literally have a 'deep' meaning."
...was actually pretty different if you get to see the whole picture:
"Here are the three of the most renowned toilets in art history. They may make you feel strange, uncomfortable, shocked, angry, or even disgusted."
"Perhaps you will despise art or vice versa, you will be pleasantly surprised how a toilet can literally have a 'deep' meaning."
"But I promise that everything won’t be just weird and bizarre."
