Martine Syms's 'The African Desperate' Satirizes Art School Culture and Millennial Aimlessness

Martine Syms's 2022 film 'The African Desperate' offers a satirical look at art school culture through the character Palace Bryant, played by Diamond Stingily. Set on a Hudson Valley, New York campus, the story unfolds during Palace's graduation day, where her final exhibition features minimal elements like an upturned bucket and Himalayan rock salt. She offers a halfhearted defense of her work to examiners, confusing diaspora with desperation, yet receives praise from professors who cite trendy Black thinkers Fred Moten and Édouard Glissant. The film critiques an educational system with a 100-percent pass rate where performative theorizing and lazy relationships dominate. After three uneventful years, Palace must endure a graduation party filled with bad music, drugs, and inconclusive sexual encounters before returning to care for her ailing mother. Syms, who studied at Bard in the Hudson Valley, portrays art school as a dead end for liberal capitalism's cultural credit line. The film captures the narcissism and detachment of American Millennialism, suggesting these qualities can sometimes produce exceptional art. While Palace has a New York solo show lined up, she has yet to create culture that makes the artworld bearable. Syms transforms these frustrations into aesthetic matter, creating a heartfelt portrait of her peers without promoting art-school student-loan debt.