White kids that study art at Yale and their primal fear of color and emotion are boring and boring art makes people do dramatic things. Kehinde Wiley was over it and turning to Fergie for inspiration, he started “flossing.”

But for all the glitz of lowriders with chrome hydraulics and gold chains, humanity has never quite out-flexed the ancients. You just can’t really top the pyramids for vain melodrama. Even a Louis Vuitton x Jeff Koons handbag with Water Lillies and gold letters doesn’t have the gravity of a life-size version of yourself cast in semi-precious metal like some kind of hologram mirror where the only reflection is your best self, no matter who is looking in.

Wiley’s rare foray into the third dimension portrays an Ethiopian-Jewish-Isreali man named Likunt Daniel Ailin who the artist met, as he does, on the street. The afro pick might square the work somewhere in the 20^th or 21^st centuries, but the pose and the expression reads r-o-y-a-l from time when the royalty shouted off with his head instead of filling tabloids.

If you paid really good attention in Hebrew school you might catch that the quote on the plinth reads “Can’t we all just get along?” The famous plea for peace from Rodney King, the man whose beating by LAPD officers sparked the L.A. riots in 1992.

An emperor asking can’t we all just get along? feels violent. The same question from Likunt Daniel Ailin seems to carry the violence that made him feel the need to ask. And here, in bronze, Ailin’s bust is both imperially threatening and rebellious, you can’t not look and wonder what exactly is going on here. Making this the least abstract piece of conceptual art ever created, except I guess for all of Koons’ stuff, but less soul-sucky.