ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS
Social media have become a vital tool for artists
— but are they good for art?
L.A. artist Micol Hebron, an artist who has had images removed from social media platforms
such as Facebook and Instagram. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)
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W
By CAROLINA A. MIRANDA
STAFF WRITER
JUNE 23, 2016
4 AM
hen the Argentine-born, London-educated artist
Amalia Ulman moved to Los Angeles in 2014, she
spent weeks chronicling the experience on Instagram
(@amaliaulman). She posted photos of her shopping
binges, her avocado toast and even her plastic surgery: a boob job,
natch.
After her move, Ulman became every stereotype of the Westside
workout woman, down to the feel-good aphorisms she also regularly
posted online. ("Don't worry about those who talk behind your back,
they're behind you for a reason.")
None of it — except for maybe the avocado toast — was real. It was a
performance, part of a larger examination of the ways in which
women depict themselves in public. “Excellences & Perfections,” as
the series was called, astutely employed Instagram’s fascination for
hyper-pretty perfection to tell a story about a quest for just such a
thing (one that involved a truckload of L.A. clichés).
"I was always interested in self-representation and the class divide,"
explains Ulman, "how people interact with each other and how
people represent themselves by what clothes they wear and what
signals they send."
As in all other corners of public and private life, the advent of social
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AnnotationThe Merchant of Venice, Act 2-3For this assignme.docx
ENTERTAINMENT & ARTSSocial media have become a vital tool
1. ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS
Social media have become a vital tool for artists
— but are they good for art?
L.A. artist Micol Hebron, an artist who has had images removed
from social media platforms
such as Facebook and Instagram. (Barbara Davidson / Los
Angeles Times)
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2. W
By CAROLINA A. MIRANDA
STAFF WRITER
JUNE 23, 2016
4 AM
hen the Argentine-born, London-educated artist
Amalia Ulman moved to Los Angeles in 2014, she
spent weeks chronicling the experience on Instagram
(@amaliaulman). She posted photos of her shopping
binges, her avocado toast and even her plastic surgery: a boob
job,
natch.
After her move, Ulman became every stereotype of the Westside
workout woman, down to the feel-good aphorisms she also
regularly
posted online. ("Don't worry about those who talk behind your
back,
they're behind you for a reason.")
None of it — except for maybe the avocado toast — was real. It
was a
performance, part of a larger examination of the ways in which
women depict themselves in public. “Excellences &
Perfections,” as
the series was called, astutely employed Instagram’s fascination
for
hyper-pretty perfection to tell a story about a quest for just such
a
thing (one that involved a truckload of L.A. clichés).
3. "I was always interested in self-representation and the class
divide,"
explains Ulman, "how people interact with each other and how
people represent themselves by what clothes they wear and what
signals they send."
As in all other corners of public and private life, the advent of
social
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media has transformed the ways in which artists interact with
each
other, their public and the institutions that govern their careers.
Services such as Facebook and Instagram have come to be
regarded as essential spaces for emerging artists to share their
4. work
(or to put it more crassly, find “new eyeballs”). Websites such
as
Artsy provide earnest how-tos on how to win over collectors on
Instagram such as use of hashtags, since these "enable
collectors to
instantly aggregate an artist’s content and also reveal public
support
for an artist."
L.A.-based art dealer Stefan Simchowitz has talked about how
he
uses Instagram to create "heat" and "velocity" for artists he
represents. And Hans Ulrich Obrist, the influential curator of
London's Serpentine Gallery, posts daily to his account —
@hansulrichobrist — a phenomenon he's described as "a
movement
of some sort."
But the relationship between art and social media is a tricky
one. The former is about pushing boundaries; the latter,
enforcing them — in the case of Instagram, in a literal square.
Issues of censorship abound. The list of individuals and
institutions who have had images removed or their accounts
suspended reads like an art world who's who, including the
Philadelphia Art Museum, for a pop painting from the 1960s
that
was deemed too suggestive, and New York magazine critic Jerry
Saltz, booted for posting images of Roman and medieval erotica
online.
https://www.artworkarchive.com/blog/why-every-artist-should-
be-on-instagram
https://www.artsy.net/article/elena-soboleva-7-ways-to-win-
over-collectors-on-instagram
6. photographs of nudity (a.k.a. "people displaying genitals") —
which
pretty much puts the kibosh on presenting a lot of contemporary
photography, not to mention documentation of historic and
contemporary performance art. The services, however, do allow
users to post "photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other
art
that depicts nude figures." (Not dissimilar to The Times'
publication standards in this area.)
But these are erratically enforced.
L.A. artist Micol Hebron, who goes by @unicornkiller1 on
Instagram, has long created images that poke at the arbitrary
notions of acceptability on social media, creating nude self-
portraits
https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards#
https://www.instagram.com/unicornkiller1/
that place artful barriers over the bits that might be deemed
offensive — such as Photoshopping acceptable male nipples
over
unacceptable female ones.
Last December, during a visit to the Rubell Family Collection in
Miami, she snapped a photo of another artist’s work — painter
Lisa
Yuskavage, who is known for producing buxom, kewpie-ish
female
figures in sherbet-y tones. The painting, titled “Northview,”
showed
a woman lifting her shirt and examining her exposed right
breast.
7. A few hours after uploading the image, Hebron discovered that
she’d
been locked out of her Facebook account and the image
removed. "Someone complained," she says. "Over a painting! A
painting of a woman looking at her own breast. It wasn't lewd or
lascivious and it didn't have sexual content at all."
For the offense, Hebron was blocked from accessing her account
for
30 days. She later created a self-portrait in the same pose —
replacing her nipple with an illustration of a cockroach. She
posted
the image on Instagram where it remains to this day.
Hebron is hardly the only one to face the arbitrary hand of
social
media moderators.
In January, an image of Copenhagen's famous statue of the
Little
Mermaid, a century-old bronze inspired by the children's fairy
tale, was removed from a Danish politician's Facebook feed for
running afoul of community standards.
https://www.yuskavage.com/artwork/4059
https://www.instagram.com/p/BAl6JGSNIzX/?taken-
by=unicornkiller1
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/news/little-mermaid-copenhagen-denmark-removed-by-
facebook-nudity-rules-a6799046.html
In March, Los Angeles artist Illma Gore made headlines when
she
was blocked from Facebook for posting a painting of a nude
Donald
8. Trump. She was ultimately given access back to her account and
the
image was re-posted (it is a painting, after all), but Gore says
the
whole experience was disheartening.
“It’s sad to me to watch it be filtered, like the news or what we
see on
TV,” she says of Facebook. “That was the saddest part for me
— that
the communities we have created are quite censored as well.”
Some of the arbitrariness is partly due to the fact that
managing standards for a "community" of 1.6 billion people
"The Little Mermaid," a bronze statue by Edvard Eriksen, that
was removed — and later reinstated
— to Facebook. (Tariq Mikkel Khan / Associated Press)
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-artist-behind-baby-dick-
trump-pic-is-now-banned-from-facebook
— Facebook's estimated user base — is hardly an exact science.
Contrary to popular lore, there is no algorithm scanning the
service
for naked butt. Currently, Facebook and Instagram rely on users
to
flag offending posts. These are then reviewed by employees of
the
company, who make the decision whether to remove the image
and/or block posting privileges.
"It is not always easy to find the right balance between enabling
people to express themselves creatively while maintaining a
9. comfortable experience for our global and culturally diverse
community of many different ages," stated a Facebook
spokesperson
via email. "But we try our best."
Even so, the process of being blocked can be bewildering.
Paddy
A curator adjusts a painting of Donald Trump by Illma Gore at
an exhibition in London. (Niklas Halle'n
/ AFP/Getty Images)
Johnson, the founder of the website blog Art F City, had her
account
frozen after a bot glitch led to a racy animated GIF being posted
on
the blog's Facebook page. Not only did she lose her privileges,
so did
everyone listed as an administrator of the page.
And trying to appeal these decisions is an opaque process. "You
get
an email and it's signed by someone with only their first name,"
says
Johnson. "I received an email from 'Keith.' "
That is not to say that social media haven’t been a boon to art in
some ways. They have allowed artists a high level of dialogue
with
their public.
"And it's changed criticism," says Lauren Cornell, a curator at
the
New Museum in New York, who also oversees some of the
10. museum's
technology initiatives. "A lot of discussion has migrated [to
sites like
Facebook].”
But it nonetheless remains "a hard place for art,” she adds. "It's
kind
of like being asked to make art in the showroom of a company.
It's a
compromised space."
Part of this is due to the very architecture of these platforms.
"Artists shouldn't be making works to get 'likes,' " she says.
"They
should be thinking about generating conversation. I think about
this
for myself. I’m not a curator so people can just give me a
thumbs
up.”
“There is also the issue of artists branding themselves and what
that
https://artfcity.com/
does,” she adds, “how they feel that in order to be an artist they
have
to create a successful 'brand' on Instagram."
This can lead to an insidious form of self-censorship, says
Ulman.
"It's not just about nudity," she explains. "It's about the need to
put
11. something up that people are going to 'like.' It becomes this
disposable idea."
The rise of social media has likewise seen the rise of the
"Instagrammable" art object or installation: Works that look
great in
a box on a phone but which may be thin when it comes to
concept or
ideas in the gallery. Random International's "Rain Room" at
LACMA
is one such installation — a work that serves more as an ideal
set for
picture-making than it does as a place where viewers can tease
out
complex ideas about nature.
Some of this may be due to the fact that the types of works
rewarded
by social media tend to be of one kind — the kind that looks
good in
a box on a phone. That generally means objects with
attractive repeating patterns or works with a graphic punch that
render well in two dimensions.
Oliver Leach, a San Francisco-based photographer who eschews
Instagram in favor of less restrictive services like Twitter,
states:
"You don't get the abject in Instagram at all. That's crucial to
me.
The abject is something you don't want to see — and it's
important
for art."
All of this, however, does make services such as Facebook and
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cam-
12. instagram-art-3-lessons-from-lacma-rain-room-20151201-
htmlstory.html
https://twitter.com/BAKKOOONN
Instagram a system ripe for messing with — which is exactly
what
artists such as Ulman have been doing.
There are others, too. Laimonas Zakas, the artist known as
Glitchr,
has long played with gaps in Facebook's code to mess with its
boxy,
blue format. And, in 2011, conceptual artist Ed Fornieles
gathered
identity information from a bunch of college students he found
on
Facebook (against the rules) and used it to create a series of
fictional
characters that he employed in a long-running online group
performance that he also staged on Facebook.
Currently, Ulman is in the midst of another piece — which she
is
shooting, Instagram by Instagram — in a small office space
downtown, in which she dons conservative office wear and
hangs
out with a pigeon named Bob.
Ulman grew up with the Web and its tropes intrigue her. But
they in
no way represent the entirety of art to her. Nor is she staging
these
performances for the sake of "likes."
"Life is not just visual," she says. "Everything has been
13. flattened into
an image because of the media, but art is more than images."
"A sculpture,” she adds, “should be allowed to be a sculpture."
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ext.html
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-havana-
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