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."
\u201c@ask_aubry "Objectively bad" \n\n- renowned and often cited musicologist Candace Owens\u201d— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
\u201c@ask_aubry But also Candace Owens is just a sucky, pandering mouthpiece for gigantic monied interests.\u201d— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
\u201c@ask_aubry She talking about Taylor "My newest album broke all Spotify records" Swift? \nBold. \ud83e\udd37\u200d\u2642\ufe0f\u201d— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
\u201c@ask_aubry I wonder what is the materic outside of human value judgements is used to to determine "badness". \n....\nobjectively bad is an oxymoron.\u201d— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
None— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
\u201c@ask_aubry That is her opinion, which obviously means squat, these 2 ladies are PHENOMENAL!!\u201d— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
\u201c@compensatenicki @PopBase She doesn\u2019t know about politics either but she is always going on about that too \ud83d\ude2d\u201d— Pop Base (@Pop Base) 1666657621
\u201c@ask_aubry I don't like certain bands, could it be that they just aren't my cup of tea? No, no it's a grand conspiracy cause I am the arbiter of taste\u201d— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
Others recognized a trend of right-wing commentators piling on to Swift.
\u201c@ask_aubry It's the current rhetoric.\nNick Adams regurgitated an avalanche of tweets saying how bad Swift's new album was, and that's because she lacks an alpha male in her life.\nPathetic, which for him, is on character.\u201d— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
\u201c@ask_aubry It's part of the RightWing Outrage Mining.\nThey'll say any outrageous thing, simply to get a reaction.\nSo more " engagements."\u201d— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
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.
\u201c@ask_aubry\u201d— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
\u201c@ask_aubry Kind of funny she chose those two given what happened with Kanye interrupting Taylor's win to say Beyonc\u00e9 had the best album or record whatever during the awards show.\u201d— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
Even the people who didn't really like Swift's new album criticized Owens for her hot take.
\u201c@ask_aubry I don\u2019t love the new TS album but she\u2019s absolutely trolling and just wants attention\u201d— AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d (@AskAubry \ud83e\udd9d) 1666666581
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."
