Arthur Jafa's career retrospective at the New Museum in New York, I Am Tony, is being read less as a victory lap than as a stress test of how the art world talks about Black artists. In a review of the show, critic Ben Davis argues that the exhibition, arranged more like a labyrinth than a conventional retrospective, recovers Jafa as an artist's artist — idiosyncratic, difficult and driven by personal psychodrama rather than by legible political messaging. Davis borrows the framework of dealer and writer Chris Sharp's 2017 essay "Theory of the Minor", which contrasted "major art" — work flattened into neat moral homilies for public communication — with "minor art" that is personal, purposeless and strange. Seen outside the charged political moment that made his reputation, Jafa's work fits the second category, Davis writes, echoing the art historian Darby English's warning against framing every Black contemporary artist as a communicator of moral truths about race. Jafa, born in 1960 in Tupelo, Mississippi, came to art through cinema and broke through in 2016 with Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, a found-footage video collage that drew large crowds. A follow-up film, The White Album, won the Golden Lion for best artist at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The review singles out AGHDRA (2021) as the heart of the New Museum show, while finding that a 2025 work, Townshend — an AI-animated rendering of the Who guitarist Pete Townshend set to fragments of the band's songs — resists interpretation even as its obduracy commands a kind of respect. The retrospective arrives in a crowded season for Jafa, who has also curated a packed display of his favourite art at the Museum of Modern Art and is among this year's Art Basel Award honourees. The review's verdict is that the show offers a chance to make sense of a genuine cultural shift: what happens to an artist forged in one era's urgencies when the art world moves on to the next.