CHICAGO — To steal, to remake, to remix, and to appropriate are all part of being a creative human being. We are inspired and influenced by the works of art we encounter. Imitation is arguably the best form of flattery, and thanks to the internet we can obtain images a whole lot easier. Copyrights be damned — didn’t pop art teach us that anything in visual culture can be appropriated?
Alicia Eler
Alicia Eler is a cultural critic and arts reporter. She is the author of the book The Selfie Generation (Skyhorse Publishing), which has been reviewed in the New York Times, WIRED Magazine and the Chicago Tribune. A native of Chicago by way of L.A., Alicia's writing has also been published in Glamour, the Guardian, CNN, Hyperallergic, Art21 Magazine, LA Weekly, and Aperture. She is currently the visual art critic/arts reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Posted inOpinion
The Insta-Aesthetics of War
CHICAGO — Explosives blow up skies the world over. From our smartphone-enhanced filter bubbles, we learn to consume these explosive images on social sites like Instagram, where the Insta-aesthetics of war know no global boundaries. Instagram offers a space for mediating the chemical explosions, corporeal and ideological worlds, blending them into a scrolling stream on smartphones.
Posted inArt
How Pop Art Got “Ripped Off”
CHICAGO — A giant replica of the classic yellow rubber duckie drifted into Hong Kong’s harbor last month. Sailing across the water, bobbing about as if in a giant, public bathtub, the Pop art-inspired duck, created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman in 2007, is essentially an enlarged version of the “original” rubber duckie.
Posted inArt
Mirrors Multiply the Selfie: The Doppelgänger Dilemma
CHICAGO — The selfie is a mirror, an illusion of a mirror, an egotistical moment wrapped in time, and an embarrassing moment post-shave. But there is something curious about seeing your doppelgänger reflected back at you rather than running into him or her on the street.
Posted inArt
A Gallery Says Goodbye with a Family Show
KANSAS CITY, Missouri — Kaitlin O’Brien is 16, and she’s gonna turn 17 in August. Arguably her biggest accomplishment this year to date was curating Thanks for the Warning (ran through June 22), a 68-person show containing 86 artworks at the Dolphin Gallery, which her father John O’Brien has owned for 24 years. This was the gallery’s final exhibition, a culmination of nearly a quarter century of work. And it was planned, conceived, and executed for reasons not commercial but familial.
Posted inArt
Facebook Is for Moms
CHICAGO — There is a set of culturally acceptable ways for mothers to be and behave in the world. Mothers aren’t allowed to have their own lives or be sexual; in essence, they’re not allowed to be human beings. When an artist who’s also a mother crosses these lines, people often react in ways that are predictable yet simultaneously a grim reflection on where we still stand culturally in regards to women and feminism.
Posted inArt
Weird Dumb Dude Energy
CHICAGO — Born from the girl brains of Chicago artists Eileen Mueller and Jamie Steele of the curatorial project GURLDONTBEDUMB (GDBD), the exhibition Weird Dude Energy (WDE) takes its inspiration from the blog of the same name, which was started in 2008 by Christine Boepple and Kerry McLaughlin.
Posted inArt
Take a Good Look at Your Selfie
CHICAGO — A few weeks ago, I thought that I’d had it with selfies It began with a simple Facebook post declaring: “Just say NO to SELFIES <3 <3 <3." Less than a week later, I found myself doing exactly what I feared: Alone in a dressing room at Target, I was snapping selfies with my iPhone, selecting the perfect one or two, and uploading them to Facebook. The selfies weren't over — in fact, they had just begun.
Posted inOpinion
If Likes Could Kill
CHICAGO — Your Facebook life won’t last forever, and you know it — that’s the gist of Geoffrey Lillemon and Stööki’s project “Like to Death.”
Posted inOpinion
How to Get Lena Dunham, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Catherine Opie to Send You an Email
CHICAGO — Miranda July’s new project We Think Alone blurs the lines between a public confession and a private thought, asking participants Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lena Dunham, Kirsten Dunst, Sheila Heti, Etgar Keret, Late and Laura Mulleavy, Catherine Opie Lee Smolin and Danh Vo to share emails with you.
Posted inArt
I, Selfie: Saying Yes to Selfies
CHICAGO — People online have a lot to say about selfies: love them, hate them, feel indifferent about them, think they’re part of internet culture, a place we escape to, meld with our offline lives (making for a fluid but often fraught IRL-URL existence), something we learn from. If the selfie is the ultimate mirror in our internet house of mirrors, and we can frame our photos and curate ourselves as we want others to see us, then surely the selfie is an act of taking back the gaze.
Posted inArt
The Facelessness of Tomorrow Begins Today
CHICAGO — It is impossible to go back to a world without biometrics and facial recognition tools, but it is not too late for a political act against the idea of allowing our faces to be scanned for the purpose of surveillance or informatic capture.
