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(screenshot via sugarselfie.us)

If you enjoy obvious jokes about the way people interact with ubiquitous technological features, you’ll love sugarselfie.us, a new website that fights bad taste with worse: a “selfie generator” that places you, thanks to some low-fi techno-maneuvering, right there at the Kara Walker Domino Sugar Factory installation, alongside the boors amid the Blackamoors. “ITS [sic] LIKE YOU ARE REALLY THERE!!!!”

The dream of Warhol at its zenith — a neoliberal quagmire wherein appearance is always more important than agency. It’s a barely clever rejoinder to a banal phenomenon long since taken to its logical conclusion, but hey, give the people what they want deserve.

Mostafa Heddaya is the former managing editor of Hyperallergic.

2 replies on “Lowest Common Denominator: A Kara Walker Selfie Generator”

  1. Good writing, Mostafa Heddaya. You nailed it nicely, “a neoliberal quagmire wherein appearance is always more important than agency”, indeed! I look forward to reading more of your writing.

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