art - others

random meaningless tumblr art

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tumblr_random_art

OK it's not truly meaningless, was just clickbaiting. Visually it's kind of intriguing. Graffiti-oid comic book surrealist panels on canvas, hanging on walls with softly sprayed graffiti-oid floor-to-ceiling imagery that somewhat mimics the panels, but with less tonal range.
It's meaningless because there is no context or explanation. Who? Where? When? Why? How? What did eyewitnesses say? If you were standing in this room would the art be good or would it "thin out"?
The pic appeared on Stephanie C. Davidson's Rising Tensions tumblr, always trenchant/entertaining.
She reblogged it about midway along the chain of 83 notes (currently). That chain originated with a post of the pic on Vacations and Tennis, a tumblr of eyegrabbing images with no captions or explanations -- one person's taste (presumably) in random interesting stuff.
The post is captioned "60197762097" and the pic is captioned "http://41.media.tumblr.com/cac61d3a2537603294bb49b7b415127b/tumblr_msk2q5Qapr1qaukwao1_1280.jpg" -- thank you David Karp for the ultimate lazy naming scheme.
The true so-called shitpic is not images blurred out by repeated instagram captures, it's a pic that exists in a void of senseless regurgitation. Lot of baggage to heap on one moderately compelling image but it must be said.
It's always possible someone will recognize the pic and email to say, "that's _______, of course, how could you not know that?" That would be documentation after the fact, completely justifying the anonymous cool-hunting.

Update: The "how could you not know that" reply took about 5 minutes. A few people noted that I could have just reverse image searched it in Google. Bamboo found the source page. Right, yes, since we live in a world of algorithmic visual intelligence the "caption" and "the art review" are probably useless backup (as long as the algorithms function). The superfluous art review for this project: "the work does not improve with increased number or clarity of documentation jpegs."

Update 2: Apparently the Goog's visual search algos have improved since a previous attempt to use them -- yes it's been that long.

not your average what?

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One of the bones of contention regarding Ryder Ripps' recent Postmasters exhibition, consisting of iPhone-distorted images based on a sportswear model's Instagram photos, was his use of the model's last name "Ho" as the show's title. Some New York critics lambasted him for this. Karen Archey in Frieze wrote:

Ho is Canadian with French and Chinese ancestry, hence the show’s title is a play on her last name that manages to be racist and misogynist simultaneously.

Johanna Fateman in Artforum added:

The most scathing critics of his new work characterize it as banal theft and sexist defacement of a woman’s images, calling out the puerile double entendre of the show’s title while they’re at it.

Artforum contributing writer Sarah Nicole Prickett tweeted:

Spends two weeks defending his feminist credentials, incredulously, after being like, called out for having a show called "Ho" as if double entendres didn't exist...

And yet, the model Adrianne Ho jokingly labels her own Twitter account "Follow a Ho! SWEAT THE STYLE":

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And is profiled in "Status" magazine in an article with the title Not Your Average Ho, containing still more jokes at her own expense:

Men dominate streetwear, but with 25-year-old muse ADRIANNE HO being Hypebeast’s pick as “The Unofficial Face of Menswear,” people might want to think twice. She appreciates a good pun and often has a self-deprecating streak in reference to her surname. Her Twitter account is filled with tweets like “It’s hot out here for a Ho” and “Ho on the go.”

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Are we "slut-shaming" here? Was Ripps? The arena for the slur was a prominent NY gallery, where privileged left-of-center bohemians bait other privileged left-of-center bohemians to claim the moral high ground. Shaming a "slut" is just as tacky in that world as being one. We could talk about Ho's "interior colonization" in using an epithet of her oppressors to self-identify. Or we could talk about "click-whoring" -- a term often used without gender association and practiced by many art magazines and non-profits in our current dystopian era of pervasive social media. We didn't talk about those things because none of the critics did any investigation to see where the use of "Ho" in its double meanings originated. It was presumed to be a one-sided gender slur and left at that (to the artist's reputational detriment).