William Kentridge, still from A Lifetime of Enthusiasm from the installation I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008), courtesy the artist.

Included in the catalogue accompanying William Kentridge: Five Themes, an important if ultimately exasperating exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, is a DVD featuring preparatory studies for several of the artist’s animated films and theatrical projects. Admirers of Kentridge’s poetic indictments of racism, industrialization, and arrant capitalism will gain insight into a working process that is more meticulous than the finished pieces necessarily let on. This is to Kentridge’s credit. Given the resolutely handmade nature of his finest work—stop-motion films made from constantly worked and re-worked charcoal drawings—overt fussiness would only diminish its gritty, elusive spell. But the DVD also sheds light on Kentridge’s greatest liability: an aesthetic hubris that has, with increasing frequency, come to dominate a singular accomplishment.

It’s there to see on the DVD’s menu. The table of contents is placed against a white wall riddled with black smudges—it’s the artist’s studio. Shortly after the screen comes up, Kentridge—portly, balding, slump-shouldered, and possessed of distinctive bushy eyebrows—wanders in from stage left, stopping just short of the DVD’s text. He’s dressed in a white shirt, black pants, and black shoes: a costume as codified as Joseph Beuys’s safari gear or Andy Warhol’s platinum wig. Kentridge engages in low-key mugging; crossing his hands and feigning mild bewilderment, he