When Stadium-Scale Production Becomes Serious Art
The number haunts you once you know it: 133.5 million people witnessed Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance at Super Bowl LIX in February 2025, making it the second-largest halftime audience in NFL history. That’s a viewership that would make any museum, gallery, or experimental theater company weep with envy. Yet the critical response has been scattered, fractured between sports commentators who praised the spectacle and music critics who focused on setlist choices and vocal delivery. Nobody seemed to notice that a genuinely radical piece of public visual art had just unfolded on the field in New Orleans.
This is precisely the kind of blindness that infuriates me. We live in an era where we’ve collectively agreed that art happens in specific, sanctioned spaces. You go to a gallery. You buy a ticket to a theater. You stream something on your curated platform. But when art appears at massive scale, in a context coded as entertainment rather than capital-A Art, we collectively fail to see it. Kendrick’s halftime show wasn’t a concert with some fancy lights. It was a meticulously constructed visual argument about Black futurism, architectural history, and public space. And it was delivered to more eyeballs than saw most major contemporary art exhibitions last year.
The Watts Towers as a Ghost in the Machine
Designer Es Devlin, who previously created the closing ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics, conceived a stage structure that referenced the Watts Towers of Los Angeles. Forty-five hundred individually programmable LED panels formed a towering, latticed structure echoing the iconic spires built by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia in South Los Angeles between 1921 and 1954. This wasn’t mere decoration. This was citation. This was art historical conversation happening in real time on a Super Bowl field.
The choice is almost too smart. The Watts Towers exist outside the mainstream art canon, built by a non-professional artist in a marginalized neighborhood using salvaged materials and sheer obsession. They’ve become icons of vernacular genius, proof that visionary architecture doesn’t require institutional validation. By translating their skeletal geometry into LED form, Devlin created a palimpsest: the towers themselves, their electronic reinterpretation, and the entire historical and social geography they represent all occupied the same visual space. Es Devlin’s studio and design philosophy has long engaged with how architecture shapes human experience and meaning-making. This project is that philosophy at maximum amplification.
What frustrated me watching mainstream sports coverage was the complete absence of this reference. Commentators described the stage as “futuristic” without understanding that its futurism was grounded in a very specific past. They treated it as visual window dressing rather than intentional design language. The structure wasn’t abstract. It was a direct conversation with Los Angeles, with Black cultural production, with the long history of outsider art in America.
Afrofuturism as Color Theory and Lived Sensation
Here’s where it gets even more interesting, and where most critics completely whiffed. The visual palette of the performance drew directly from Kodwo Eshun’s 1998 theoretical text “More Brilliant Than the Sun,” a foundational text in Afrofuturist thinking. Eshun’s work doesn’t just theorize Afrofuturism as a cultural movement. It argues that the color and texture of sound creates a visual language that precedes any literal visual representation. He writes about how Black artists have used technology and abstraction to create futures that don’t yet exist.
The LED panels created a color landscape corresponding to this theory. Deep magentas bleeding into electric teals, golden yellows that seemed to hum with their own frequency, blacks so absolute they created voids. Artforum’s March 2025 halftime show analysis was one of the only critical outlets that identified this connection explicitly, tracing how the performance’s chromatic choices weren’t arbitrary but were instead visual translations of Eshun’s color philosophy. This is where Kendrick’s performance functioned as genuine art criticism and theoretical practice, not just entertainment that happened to look good.
Most music journalism missed this entirely because most music journalists aren’t trained to think about color as theory. They can discuss beats and lyrics and flow. But the actual visual philosophy grounding the production? That requires a different kind of literacy, one combining art history, cultural theory, and design practice. The performance demanded that literacy from its viewers, and most viewers simply couldn’t access it.
When Commodity and Art Collapse Into Each Other
The tensions get even more productive when you consider the merchandise ecosystem surrounding the performance. Nike released a limited “Not Like Us” Air Force 1 collaboration, and the shoe sold out in under eight minutes. By Q3 2025, pairs were reselling on StockX for an average of $480. This is where the cynical reading becomes almost impossible to sustain. Are we talking about art or commercial product? The answer is: yes.
This collapse between art and commodity isn’t a failure or a corruption. It’s become the primary mode through which contemporary culture circulates meaning. The sneaker isn’t separate from the performance. It’s an extension of it, another medium through which the visual language and conceptual framework can move through the world. The fact that the resale price nearly quadrupled creates its own kind of value signal. People understood, on some level, that they were participating in something culturally significant. They might not have had the language to articulate why, but their market behavior indicated it anyway.
The Cost of Invisibility
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill called the performance “the most coherent piece of public visual art America has produced in a decade” in his February 2025 interview with The New Yorker. Threadgill has spent his entire career working at the intersection of visual and sonic complexity, so his assessment carries specific weight. He recognized what he was seeing: a unified vision articulated across multiple media, operating at both intimate and massive scale simultaneously, engaging with historical precedent while pushing into genuine aesthetic territory.
And yet even Threadgill’s endorsement didn’t shift the critical conversation significantly. We continued to describe the performance as “Kendrick’s halftime show” rather than as the collaborative artwork it actually was. We continued to prioritize music criticism’s framework over visual and design criticism’s framework. We continued to operate from the assumption that this was entertainment, not art.
This failure of critical attention bothers me because it reveals something genuinely broken in how we value and parse cultural production. A performance with 133.5 million viewers that engages directly with architectural history, color theory, and Afrofuturist philosophy deserves more intellectual rigor than we’ve given it. It deserves to be discussed alongside major museum exhibitions and biennial presentations. It deserves to be recognized as what it actually was: a significant artwork that happened to reach an incomprehensibly large audience.
What are your thoughts on how we evaluate large-scale cultural moments? Do you think the framework matters, or is that just critic gatekeeping? I’m genuinely interested in how you parsed what you saw.
