LOS ANGELES — What’s the best thing about selfies right now? That they are everywhere, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. According to the internet, selfies are both the cause and effect of many social issues today.
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 inArt
The Curious Thing about #Hashtags
The new web series #Hashtag follows the lives of young queer women in Chicago whose dating patterns and attractions are significantly affected by the technologies that they use and, at times, abuse.
Posted inBooks
Duh, It’s Postmodern Poetry
Jon Rutzmoser’s thin book of poetry packed with thick descriptions of dicks, dire and dramatic Oedipal complexes, heavy-petting psychoanalytic theory references, and Disneyland descriptors made me laugh, pissed me off, had me rolling my eyes, and had me wondering what it means to write poetry today.
Posted inArt
Selfie Illusions
LOS ANGELES — How do we talk about real shit online? In the selfie world, where we become two-dimensional representations of ourselves as we would like to be seen, it’s sometimes not possible to do more than just like, reblog, retweet, ignore, or simply comment.
Posted inArt
Laboring Over Walead Beshty’s Bodies
LOS ANGELES — Walead Beshty’s solo exhibition at Regen Projects, Selected Bodies of Work, claims to “address bodies and labor as they are rendered visible in or on the art object.” Where and what are these bodies and labor?
Posted inArt
Documenting Indigenous Americans
LOS ANGELES — Between the years 1907 and 1930, Edward Sheriff Curtis published The North American Indian, a record of traditional Indian cultures in the United States and Canada. Curtis’ book, a landmark historical document with a foreword by Theodore Roosevelt, has been digitized and his photographs are available online to all those who seek them.
Posted inArt
Seeing Past Portland’s Whiteness
LOS ANGELES — I didn’t mean for my trip to Portland to have such a focus on race.
Posted inArt
Not Your Average Selfie
LOS ANGELES — Non-celebrities are more innovative with the selfie because all eyes are not (yet) on them.
Posted inArt
Living in a Post-Private World
What if we were more aware of the thoughts and exchanges that we’re unwittingly making public? That’s the intention of neverhitsend, a 12-person LA-based arts and technology collective that formed in 2013, post–Snowden leaks, to discuss issues of digital communications today.
Posted inArt
Kara Walker Lands in Oregon
EUGENE, Oregon — The Black Portlanders, a project initiated by Intisar Abioto that focuses on the black people of Portland documenting one another, recently posted an open letter asking for help raising $15,000 to keep alive their project.
Posted inArt
Printing the Performative Object
Outside of his own performance art practice, which fluidly intersects with his life, Brian Getnick and artist/designer Tanya Rubbak collaboratively publish the LA-based performance art journal Native Strategies.
Posted inArt
Selfie Justification
LOS ANGELES — I hit the brakes at a stoplight and turn my head to the left. I spot a young woman waiting for the bus. In golden capital letters on her t-shirt, the words WHY NOT shine boldly.