The artwork interpreted and questioned the place of African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era with particular attention to the social lifts available to black youth. Although its composition did not point specifically to the matters of race, the use of basketball imagery still hinted to basketball as a predominantly black sport. Apart from that, Hammons always maintained that he, as a black artist, had a moral duty to graphically document what he felt socially.3 In this sense, Higher Goals was a comment on the arduous path to success for a black person in America. Professional sports were and are among the limited number of social lifts available for an African American, but achieving success in this highly competitive field is no easier than climbing a 30-feet pole. For every athlete who is able to reach the top, there are thousands of those who do not just as numerous as the bottle caps studded into the poles. Finally, one should not disregard the deliberately unsaleable nature of the piece.4 By intentionally making his artistic reflection on black athletes unavailable for purchase, Hammons criticized the commercialization of African American bodies in professional sports.
Another artist to analyze this theme in his works was William Pope L., famous for his practice of performative crawl interventions. One of his works related directly to the matters of race and, in particular, commercialization of black sports bodies was the Budapest Crawl of 999. In this performance, Pope, dressed in white athletic shorts, a sports jersey, Nike sneakers, and elbow a
nd kneepads, crawled from the Danube River to the building of the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest.5 While traversing the capital of Hungary, Pope held a bottle of cologne in one hand and a small globe in another.6 As a performance artist, Pope used his Budapest Crawl to attract attention to the increasing international commodification of a black body.
The design of the performance attracted attention to racial matters, beginning with a sharp contrast between the artists black skin and his white clothes. The sports uniform was also a pivotal element in making the performance a sharp social commentary. Throughout the 990s, black athletes and, in particular, basketball superstars became a central feature in sports advertising for the company Nike, thus enacting a discursive relation between race, advertising, and brand recognition.7 Moreover, advertising often represented black athletes as examples of racialized sexual desire, thus reducing them to consumable objects.8 In this historical context, Popes Budapest Crawl was a protest against the commodification of the black body as a sexualized consumable, symbolized by cologne as associated with male sexual appeal. The artists mode of moving was an apt choice to highlight the point. Nikes basketball commercials of the 990s focused on Michael Jordans ability to fly even his logo depicted the athlete as reaching upward and defying gravity.9 Popes lowly crawl, on the other hand, served as a counterpoint, suggesting that, no matter how high a black male athlete can fly, mass culture still regards him as a commodity.