The author posted a review of you shortly after your review or fifteen years later? Both are bizarre and messed up, I'm not even sure which one would be worse.
it may not have elicited quite the extreme reaction. a 3 can be harsher than a 1.
while an “unredeemable moron” might leave one star, that may not meet the bar for a response. while fighting with idiots on the internet is a past time, it is typically one entertained by… idiots.
a three star review, on the other hand. no, this takes thought. a thinker left that harsh judgement. a foolish thinker, but a thinker. thoughtful, but wrong, incorrect. flawed. no mere idiot, so it must be an asshole. and we can’t have that. justice must be preserved.
This is why I've moved away from arguing with people on the internet, because there are too many people out there today who are absolutely deranged and will make it literally their life's mission to stalk you through every means at their disposal.
Also - mostly thanks to discord - it's trivial to summon an army of kids who are under the age of criminal responsibility who will do almost anything (online) if you kick them a few robux.
“World’s Most Popular” - nevertheless, I’m fairly aesthetically inclined and this is the first time I’ve ever heard of the guy.
It’s also the case that the popular mainstream has become conservative to the point of fascism where it comes to critique. Positivity denying its opposite. The responses from the artist were also strange and overlooked their own contradiction, as in “you’re just one person with one opinion” (but my followers are also single people with single opinions, all of which must be positive at all times).
I got it. The art is technically very well executed, but it’s nevertheless a hyper realistic take of an extremely bland instagram-type photo, again and again, which makes sense why it would be popular on instagram, and amongst the blandified youth with little taste and little knowledge of art history. Not really surprising.
The article here and the earlier article that triggered the social media kickback both assert that "the art" includes both the images and the staging and presentation on social media.
Much like <insert other famous artist> who made themselves an essential intertwined part of the <other famous artist> art show.
He doesn’t need to be crying about not getting gallery representation then. He could also think about the aboriginal artists in Australia, who live totally offline and in the desert 300 miles away from the middle of nowhere, who still nevertheless manage to get gallery representation. Will be interesting to see what he’s producing in 5-10 years time.
The point of the original review is actually that it's his tik tok fame and video format that is what creates the audience and not the art itself. His fans have little interest in the actual art, it's the vicarious and voyeuristic aspect that his fortune is built off, the art is incidental.
Yeah, the painting is boring, safe, well trodden material (and he's not good at hands!) but the phenomenon is social media. The hype machine. The parasocial relationships.
Many extremely famous artists are also performance artists. Dali, Picasso, Warhol, Hirst, Banksy. All of them made some kind of performance to go alongside the art, whether it's crazy personality, or controversy, or nobody knowing what you look like, it's a performance. You need to get people talking about you and the art will only get you so far, in many cases. Great as, for example, Dali's art is, would he have been as famous without the mustache and pet anteater?
Of course there's plenty of counterexamples where the art alone was enough for fame. Esther and Van Gogh come to mind.
Right, but Picasso's performance was of _himself_ alongside his art. This guy is making a performance out of the act of making the art, and then people's real-time reaction to that art.
I'm an artist and I've never heard of him until now, but then again I am not into TikTok. Drawing people in public is pretty basic stuff for people who get a degree in art; it's not anything new or original. He is clearly very good at gaining an audience which is a good skill, and his portraits seem very skillful from what I can see. Realism is a very minor type of art since photography exists; outside of TikTok it's not a big market. But dealing with criticism is also a necessary skill which he seems to lack. One person is an artist; the other 8B people are critics.
Thats one of the things that people forget about social media. It is mostly a younger, inexperienced people who get entertained by new things that people haven't seen before. Its not their fault, they just have not lived enough yet.
See also the Theory of Chinese (Indian) Indifference: No matter how famous you are, not matter how notable your accomplishments, a billion Chinese (Indians) have never heard of you and couldn't care less.
Either one of the lucky 10,000 or one of a smaller number pointing out that he’s not the world’s most popular painter. “World’s most popular” painter amongst the demographic of American TikTok users under the age of 35.
You’d have to say “painting”. I’d say the art of Taylor Swift would probably be enjoyed more regularly and wholeheartedly if we’re talking about the entire class of artists. If we’re talking about the entire class of content creators on TikTok, then I don’t have the stats.
He might technically be the most popular painter, but only because he's extremely popular among a narrow demographic. It's like how the most popular youtube channels are the ones with animated children's songs. Sure, they're the most popular but in a diverse population relatively few would have heard about them.
I’d hazard a guess that there are more people who are wearing clothes featuring art by Keith Haring than this guy has followers. But if we’re talking about artists who are alive, then Keith probably doesn’t count. All the best artists are dead.
I have a MA in art and am currently on a commision that selects a painting professor for one of the prolific central european art schools. I have never heard of the guy.
There is a lot of art that is basically just crafts. Technically skilled and beautiful to many people who have been to a museum once or twice (and there are many of those!) — people are baffled by the fact that someone can paint realistically — ignoring a rich art history that should make clear that doing just that is the bare minimum and clearly not the point of good art.
But in the end all those works are more or less uninteresting beyond that. They lack the stuff that makes Mona Lisa's smile famous, the stuff that Hopper has in his pictures, the crows over the fields in Van Goghs paintings, Yves Kleins blue etc. If your art lacks the art while delivering technical skill it will still remain ultimately hollow. And if your ownly impact your art makes on the world is fighting your critics you should wonder why you are doing it.
It's kinda clickbait, but at the start of an article it's laid out as this:
> He is, by some measures, the most famous artist in the world, with many millions of social media followers
Yeah this is what I mean. And I am certainly not a snob that thinks only what the upper class or academics see as art is actual art.
In fact bad taste in art is equally common in the upper class. Just have a look at how Silvio Berlusconi's heirs are struggling to sell the stuff he considered art for example.
Being known doesn't mean you are exemplary of what you are doing. If you have a famous youtube tutorial channel for javascript, you might be one of the most widely known javascript programmers — but that doesn't automatically mean you are the "best" (or even a half-way decent) programmer. It still might mean that you are a stellar teacher and an exceptional communicator, which worth a lot, but if you confuse yourself for something that you are not this is where the problems start.
To the general public that guy might be what they think a good Javascript-Dev looks like, but ultimatly he isn't. I had to think of Bob Ross: A legendary communicator, a good ambassador for the arts and a good human being, but I wouldn't buy his art if I found it at a thrift store. But Bob Ross knew that his skill was being a communicator for the arts and didn't confuse himself with the painters who managed to get their works into the big art instutions.
Not sure if bare minimum is the right expression, when so many of the famous pieces could be easily replicated by my 5-yo niece - who could never reach said ”minimum”
I am someone who does a lot of things many people feel are hard. I solder SMD on component level, I play fretless instruments, I program. Yet the hard part is never what you can just imitate.
Soldering SMD is something I can teach a non-electronic person in a few hours, for example. The hard part is knowing what to solder and when. Similarily learning to do the pure technical act of drawing or painting photorealistically can be learned. To paint motifs that are worth doing so and result in a "good picture" are something different entirely.
Maybe you have to take my word for it, as someone who in his life went through hundreds of art school applications, but there will be a difference between some abstract thing a person with true skill and talent did, and something your five year old neice did (nothing against her, maybe she has talent, who knows). Something being (seemingly, to the layperson) easy to copy does not mean that it is. Very often there will be much more behind the work than it seems on first glance. A lot of the very abstract stuff you will find in the museums for example was done in a time where nearly nobody dared to do this. So if your neice wanted to copy that, she needed to go back in time, grow up there and do it back when nobody did it. So yeah she could maybe do it. But she didn't.
When comparing abstract and concrete painting there is a lot to be discussed, but trust me when I say that people in the art scene probably look at art just in a different way that most people. Many people have misconceptions about art a la "what does the artist want to tell us" and then there is just a bunch of splashes on the canvas. The artist can sometimes be a trickster and the art understood from the context in which it was created. Sometimes art also just is and in a world where everything has to be about money, efficiency, entertainment, etc it can serve as a room of reflection with something that is beyond simple answers. I am not going to give a grand defense of abstract art here, I am not a painter and if I were it would probably not be purely abstract.
Now historically painters went into the abstraction when photography came around, which could create the photorealistic image very easily. Nowadays photorealistic painters often just take a photograph and (like your neice), copy it to the pixel. That is of course a lot of work, and maybe there is even a bit of art or rebellion in that amount of work itself, but I find it more interesting when people pull out things from seemingly nowhere in their very own and unique ways.
But I am a musician and I work a lot with harsh noises many people hate to hear. I don't think there is any need for me to even attempt to defend what I like to do and so shouldn't painters.
I know people say this all the time, but I've yet to see anybody actually try. Pick some "famous pieces" and have your 5-year old niece try to reproduce them. I'm sure you (and she) will find there is a lot more to them than superficially meets the eye.
A comparison for the tech crowd would be the difference between being able to learn and write complex syntax and writing a clear, concise, bug-free software.
To non-software people the syntax is what seems impossibly hard and in their view writing a software that works, reliably is what should be easy. The truth is just the opposite. So to non-software people, someone writing Hello World in brainfuck would seem crazier than someone writing a good piece of software that solves a hard problem.
So judging the craft can be hard if you are not doing the craft yourself. A painter like Picasso could draw completely realistic at age 19 and spent the following decades doing more abstract things. Not because the realistic stuff was hard and he was lazy, but quite the other way around. Writing a complicated program with obscure syntax and many million lines is possible, but it takes a true master to do the same thing in a very readable, maintainable way, while making it shorter. Art can, at times, be very similar.
I don't think the coding analogy holds at all. To me, writing good working maintainable software of non trivial complexity is craft, and to call it that is high praise indeed. I'm not entirely sure what art is, but I think it tends to happen when someone wants to create for the sake of creating, rather than maximising commercial gain, status, or whatever. It's orthogonal to craft.
I enjoyed the Picasso museum in Barcelona and it was indeed eye opening to see his conventional but excellent architectural drawings ;-)
Picasso for example was a master because he understood that beyond the technical is where the real callenge lies. Now the question would be whether that beyond is part of the craft or not.
Ultimately this isn't that important, my point was rather about technicality. Technicality alone doesn't make a great master, just like syntax knowledge alone doesn't make you a great software engineer. But in coding the goal is typically to write good software and the criteria for good software are pretty clear — compared to what makes good art at least. Now as an artist you can totally suck at many things but be good at one specific thing that you did in a very specific and novel way and this alone can make the difference.
One could say with our subway painter that the special thing about him are not the paintings but how he medializes their creation. But just painting realistically is something many people can do, and many also can do better.
Yes, his celebrity and fame stem from the performance, not the art. He could still have a long and successful celebrity career, periodically making waves with more commercialized and staged performances. Like Banksy, but with a good face and real backstory.
I do question calling those art. Monochromes were absolutely not new when Klein does a blue one. That's already quite mediocre. But then he makes more of the same painting. How is that art?
My considered opinion is "if it's not purely functional, it's art". Every other definition ends up self-contradictory. Screwdriver handles are art - 1,000 models of screwdrivers, all doing their job just fine, yet all with different handles. That's the designer putting forward his ideas of what evokes comfort, power, notability, progress, and whatever else, and in turn two different screwdrivers will generate different feelings in their owners. That's art; it may not be art that appeals to millions, or endures centuries, but very little does.
I know the definition (natural nor functional), but the post I'm replying to makes quite a distinction. It calls the work (there's another term for you) from the article not art. But Klein's Blue is one of the things that stands out to me as falling in the category "mediocre idea, mediocre execution." The idea was a cliche, the artist failed in conveying it in the execution, and the execution of the work itself was as good as the wall I painted last year. Why isn't my wall art?
Art imo always should have at least a tiny bit of anarchic moment as it tries to relate itself to the world that is. Of it doesn't or is purely about selling or copying, it stops being art.
A guy that paints walls for his job, isn't doing art, just because he holds a brush and paints a wall. But just because it is his job and it serves a function doesn't mean he couldn't create art when he paints a wall. In the end it is a lot about the mindset of the artist and how they are willing to involve others with that mindset.
But uninteresting to an art specialist like you does not make it uninteresting to his many, many fans. Of course what he does is art, what meaningful line can you put between art and craft? I'd even argue that he has far more impact on the world by bringing a little aesthetic happiness to millions than even a Turner-prize winning artist like Tai Shani, who's meaningful only to a few.
I am not an art specialist. I studied art, but my field was film, not painting. My mother is a painter so maybe that counts who knows.
I did not say anything about his role in society and whether it is okay to like him or not. It is. It was also great for Bob Ross for example to do what he did in communicating art: His paintings are not stellar examples of landscape painting, but he managed to inspire many people to go for the journey and that is worth a lot.
Subjectively, to me as someone who has a closer background to arts than most I find it lacks something — and that something might make all the difference between lasting love or forgetting him in a few years time. Other people might have differing opinions.
Think of any field you know something of. E.g. if you are in tech there might be some celebrity non-tech people see as a tech genius. But you know they are mediocre at best. That doesn't takw away from their ability to reach people, but it is not the same as being stellar in their field.
Establishment art is just technical proficiency mixed with good marketing. In fact, you can do what artists like Jeff Koons do and just skip the skip the technical proficiency step. I don't see how, at its core, it is any different from what this TikToker is doing.
Perhaps the fact you've never heard of him is why this is such an explosive situation. An art critic sees "just some guy who is very skilled at painting" but literally millions of people see him as "the best modern painter" because the state of nuanced art isn't exactly at the forefront of society's interests.
The art world as participating artists see it isn't the art world the rest of the world sees. These Tiktok people are to art what televised wrestling is to martial arts: very skilled people performing impressive feats designed for entertainment more than anything.
He seems to be a talented speed drawer, street performer. Probably the best of those seen in touristy spots.
Art? ... probably. Or definitely, according to the nervous masses furious about the uninterested or unfriendly parts of the world.
I'll decide later if I am ashamed of not knowing him and still not that much interested.
It was an interesting 15 minutes of my life I spent on this phenomenon though.
Well, one could be faily musically inclined and never have listened to "despacito" on the height of its fame.
And I think that in this case,the critic was kind of a dick in his critic. In a very knowledgeable and eloquent manner he implies that if (from his perspective) the painter is not very good nor the art he produces, then the only explanation is that all the people who enjoys his art are gullible simpletons who don't know art. He has every right to have this opinion, of course, but he shouldn't be surprised if the gullible simpletons in question loudly disagree.
> Devon Rodriguez is almost certainly the most famous artist in the world, at least on one level. Almost no one I know has ever heard of him.
It's clear that the author means that in _popular circles_, he's very famous, but in _critical circles_, he's unknown. The author isn't trying to draw a comparison with Van Gogh. He's trying to make a statement about the changing nature of what it means to be a popular artist.
I think the parent post is making a very valid point that even in _popular circles_ he's relatively unknown, as his fan base may be large, very intense and vocal on social media but is still tiny fraction of the general public, the vast majority of whom have never heard of this artist but would know various older mainstream artists.
"Many millions" is a lot when compared to my popularity, but insignificant when compared to actually popular artists.
Like, HN is not a forum where art critics would be overrepresented, and it would be somewhat reasonable reflection "popular circles" and even one that favors an artist which, according to the article, draws heavily on younger and more app-using population than the general one. If we'd have a poll right here about artists people can name, do you really think that he would come out on top? Or even be in top 10?
I'd probably struggle to name three living painters (the claim in the title wasn't about "artists" but "painters"). It feels like a moribund artform, there's no such thing as a mainstream painter any more. If there's fame to be had in it, it's mostly due to the art being attached to something else (comics, games, or in this particular case TikTok videos) rather than as standalone pieces of art.
It's actually kind of interesting. There's tons of living actors, authors, directors, and musicians that are household names on a global scale. But architects, painters, poets or sculptors? Everyone I can think of is dead.
> I'd probably struggle to name three living painters (the claim in the title wasn't about "artists" but "painters").
Hockney, Hirst (even if he only moved into painting fairly recently), Kit Williams. But yeah I'm struggling to come up with a fourth.
> It's actually kind of interesting. There's tons of living actors, authors, directors, and musicians that are household names on a global scale. But architects, painters, poets or sculptors? Everyone I can think of is dead.
Architects I disagree with, but for the rest there's a lot more competition lately. Painting never really recovered its social standing after the rise of photography. There are a lot of alternatives to a poetry reading, many of them more enjoyable or at least more accessible.
She's not a mere dauber. She's skilled. She's not just a "conceptual artist".
I thought Picasso was all about revolutionizing art, until I visited the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, and saw his juvenilia. Then I realized that he was an extremely skilled draughtsman, anatomist and figurative painter.
I'm not keen on Tracy Emin, but I was mistaken to underestimate her.
> There's tons of living actors, authors, directors, and musicians that are household names on a global scale. But architects, painters, poets or sculptors?
It's music too.
The largest concerts in history according to Wikipedia belong to Vasco Rossi, Bijelo Dugme, and Glay.
Ever heard of them?
I suspect we're simply unaware of the marketing bias we're all walking around with.
Usually "most X person in the world" implies "living". Otherwise, the phrase is usually "most X person ever" or "in history".
That said, I've never heard of this person, but I'm probably way out of touch with popular art. When I think of popular living artists, I think of Dale Chihuly, Takashi Murakami, and Banksy.
The article is really nice, with a fresh perspective on how we-the-public (or, rather, segments of the public with very different worldview) perceive creations and creators, and how that seems changed recently because of the incentives driven by social media.
But perhaps similar interplay of the triangle of artist-fans-critic was already there a century or two ago, just on a smaller scale ?
Most of Beatles fans I encounter are half my age. I don't know what's going on, I think Beatles are quite boring and very shallow but maybe they were on to something.
It's kind of a justified title if people generally only know the brand, not the creators behind them these days. And from a critics' perspective that makes a huge difference, as pointed out in the article.
HN is (very deliberately) my only social media other than what my friends send me.
I am not saying anything you don't already know by saying that parasocial relationships are so evil because they get the time that formerly would have gone into your real human relationships but don't give you anywhere near the payoff.
In many ways the genie is out of the bottle/Pandora's box is open but the attention economy might just be the most insidious technology ever invented.
My girlfriend's niece is in her 20s and talks incessantly about people she has never known or will never meet. She's a walking US magazine. It's disturbing that she treats PR releases like holy texts. These ARE the people in her life and they don't know she exists.
The phenomenon you're describing is hardly limited to parasocial relationships. Some people talk about sports teams, others about company stocks they have no valuable information on, others about drama in their subcultures, others about world news... we are about to start getting huge amounts of discussion around election polling in states none of your friends live in. "Do I have any power over anything related to this information?" has almost no psychological significance.
I do not know whether TV show plots belong in this list, but they might.
It’s maybe worse than what you say, because there is a vicious cycle where individuals whose time is absorbed by parasocial relationships are less available to people around them. Those people may in turn become isolated and turn to… parasocial relationships.
> individuals whose time is absorbed by parasocial relationships are less available to people around them.
I’ve seen Mastodon and Tumblr users post, “I’m sick of people saying I should spend time with my neighbors. They’re probably TERFs/MAGA/whatever.” (There may be analogues mutatis mutanda on other sites, I don’t know firsthand.) You’ll have a hard time convincing people that social walling-off is a bad thing when they have elevated it to a virtue.
>“I’m sick of people saying I should spend time with my neighbors. They’re probably TERFs/MAGA/whatever.”
This isn't entirely wrong-headed though, I think it's just a symptom of a society that's become too divided. If you want a healthy community of people living together in one place, they need to all share a common culture and ethical framework. In America these days, that just isn't the case, and you can't expect people to be buddies with people who happen to live close by, but have diametrically-opposed viewpoints and even view them as evil (for instance, the neighbor is a MAGA person and the person in question is homosexual).
At the core it's not that much different from how people have reacted over the ages to anyone dissing their favorite athlete, or the Pope, or making fun of the prophet Muhammad.
Once you take on a person or idea as part of your core, any attack upon that person or idea becomes a VERY personal attack upon you, and the response is visceral and irrational (I suspect that it actually suppresses the higher functions of the brain). I've watched so many people come apart at the seams when one of their sacred cows were attacked, even becoming violent in some cases.
The only difference nowadays is the speed with which people can reach this level of reveredness.
The direction is the other way though. And it is a one way relationship. It is not the same concept as "influencer" fans, unless the diety is alive of course.
How is it the other way? The relationship of a believer to God is similar to that of a fan to, say, Taylor Swift. In both cases, the follower imagines a personal relationship that doesn't exist. The only substantial difference is that behind Taylor Swift's fictional public persona there is an actual human being (which is mostly irrelevant to the parasocial relationship).
> The only difference nowadays is the speed with which people can reach this level of reveredness.
There is one other difference too: there's now an entire economy built around getting people to "this level of reveredness" for someone - doesn't matter who or why, the specific person or idea are not the point - and then pitting those someones against each other in dramas that are totally genuine and not at all unscripted. The point is to trigger and maintain this "visceral and irrational" response, because while in this state, the followers will happily buy pretty much any kind of high-margin, low-value garbage their favored online persona endorses, and they'll even feel good about it. It's a money printed machine.
I mean, it's one thing when people got angry over someone insulting the Pope, or the prophet Muhammad. It's different when you imagine Pope and prophet Muhammad were two besties, pitting their followers against each other, so they can sell them merch, raking in amounts of money they could've never get on their own. The latter is what's happening today, at scale.
I mean ... what of it? It's the strange idea that the critic is 'attacking' the artist and making him feel bad for no reason. So this random stranger is trying to make the critic emphasise with the poor smol bean artist. It's very odd.
I've seen this kind of thin-skinned, childish behaviour far too many times in the past. One instances, from years ago, really stands out.
A well-known language learning blogger posted a review of a learning site (created by another blogger, with whom he had several disagreements). The review was generally positive, but the other blogger took undue offense to some of the criticisms in the review (which were laid out politely and accurately). He not only posted a snarky "review" of blog from whence the review sprang but his followers jumped in, castigating the reviewer in various online forums.
While I never expected corners of the internet to be a revival of Enlightenment-era salons, I'd hoped that they wouldn't be virtual pile ons. I'm naive ...
I have a thin skin so I solve this problem by making sure everything I produce is so perfect and wonderful that no one would ever have a negative comment
It's so simultaneously baffling and repulsive to me that a celebrity can so easily weaponize their throngs of parasocial adoring masses and point them like a mob cannon at somebody. It's unfortunate how tribalism / pack mentality quickly leads to control and manipulation.
I wonder if tiktok is just one big hood culture. Where everyone is trying to defending their reputation. As any attack, no matter how minor is an attack on their honour.
Definitely feels like it based on that painters reaction.
If you etch away anyone's social norms you will get the same person, because everybody is the same. This might not be exactly true because of personality differences, but it is exactly true when the population is big enough for all personalities to be represented.
If the selection criteria for two groups of people is "anybody" and the rules imposed on them are, "do whatever comes naturally in the absence of institutions or accepted culture," the things you see the groups doing will be almost exactly the same.
You say hood culture but it's just human culture/human nature. We're all animals at the end of the day!
TikTok is all about clout generation, if you're a content producer then you're used to positive feedback & I'm pretty sure TikTok's dark patterns will definitely involve promoting positive comments on your videos and burying negative ones.
They want you to have that Oxytocin feelgood rush again & again because...then you keep using their app!
They've already been found to do things like show Ukraine videos to Ukrainians but hide them from Russians, whereas Russians are shown cute cat videos and fake news about Ukraine. Pretty sure their dark patterns will include exactly that: find your demographic and push more of what you like, hide negativity and boost positivity within your bubble. Although most social media platforms are guilty of this; it's how they work.
What makes TikTok different? Well they've very clearly targeted a much younger demographic, I remember back in what 2017-2018 or so? Stickers with the TikTok logo but nothing else slapped onto utility poles, atms, etc in a guerrilla marketing move designed to capture a certain demographic. But it's also largely short form content - dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit. But it makes me wonder if it trains users to react with no long term attachment. See this dude's video, send a hate/death threat message, pop back into TikTok and move on to the next funi feelgood video.
Does consumption of shortform content have an effect on attention span/apathy?
The first issue is that it's too long, so none of his ticky-tocky-tribe even read it.
Joking aside, the review doesn't feel over the top or unfair and given that any review is an opinion piece, it's the reaction that was way over the top.
This is a really nice piece and very thoughtful and professional. I'm pleasantly surprised as things with titles of this sort are much more typically someone playing the victim card under circumstances where it's not possible to sort out who is "the guilty party" and who is "the real victim."
I actually clicked into it expecting to feel like "Why is this on the front page of HN?" and I don't feel that way at all.
In fact, the only way I can understand Rodriguez’s incredibly thin-skinned reaction to my article is that he has managed to rise to this status of apex visibility without any kind of critical writing about him at all. It’s all just been feel-good profiles, so that the first critical word feels like a huge crisis. That’s a relatively new kind of situation for an artist to be in, and worth analyzing.
In addition to this, he more or less makes the point that Rodriquez is so famous because he cultivates a personal relationship to his audience or a "faux personal" -- a parasocial one -- and his fans are more invested in that than in his art per se. This is the opposite of how it usually goes in traditional art circles. Usually, the art comes first and then people become interested in the artist.
It's interesting to me because I've spent a lot of years trying to sort out how to have a "relationship to the public" -- a constructive one, a professional one. Women on the internet tend to attract a lot of drama and I've spent a lot of time trying to sort things out in a way that makes sense to me so I can try to get that down to a dull roar and I have found it helpful to see male-coded behavior as being about being raised to have "a real career," which boils down to a professional relationship to the public, to people who are not family and friends, and female-coded behavior as about personal relationships.
How do you make that professional versus personal distinction that this article touches on? How do you get people interested in your work instead of interested in some faux "personal" relationship to a woman they really don't know well but want to imagine they do for reasons I have trouble grasping?
And so this piece parallels some of my observations about gender issues. I think women get raised to have personal relationships and don't get raised to have professional lives and when we go online, we talk and behave in a way that is very personal. Other people hunger for that, want more of it, actively encourage women to do more of that and no one tells us "Honey, that's unprofessional" and if they do we tend to feel like "You're just a sexist pig trying to gatekeep me out!" and not like "Oh. I didn't realize doing X was a problem."
So it's interesting to me to see this piece and I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. I really expected this to be another internet "he said/she said" kind of thing and I'm blown away that it's not that at all and we need more of this type of analysis of how and why things sometimes go sideways on the internet. It's our only hope of having fewer such incidents.
Personal-professional relationships are stronger than professional images, especially as it becomes less and less possible to get a job without a well-placed reference from a friend who is willing to go to bat for you. Although companies in the tech industry make more effort to have "meritocratic" (in fact random, there's nothing meritocratic about trying to guess someone's project management ability using eight hours of talking to people they've never met before, spread out over days) I see this being eroded over time as everyone pulls together in our low-interest-rate where's-the-recession, it's-coming-any-day-now environment. Although hiring managers might disagree on whose friends among them should be hired, they will all silently agree that the hiring system needs to only hire friends of somebody. That's what drives the evolution of corporate process in an inexorable slide towards the equilibrium most industries have already reached, one where consultants are brought in to cover the holes left by bringing in old friends.
I think the interchangeable parts era of tech work is nearly over and we're heading into something that will look more like highly paid roles in other industries. This could do a lot for gender equality[0], or maybe destroy it[1].
[0] Discrimination can work its way into randomized panel type scenarios because biases tend to show up in averages of first impressions more than they do in long-term relationships. That's why they use an "implicit bias test" that involves flashing pictures at you, and why the "I have female friends," argument is not taken seriously by anybody. What psychologists are telling us is that discrimination is maximized in the snap judgement scenarios posed by modern hiring processes.
[1] A network of long-term professional relationships that can't be unseated by anyone that isn't taken on as an apprentice literally describes the patriarchy.
I do think there's a bright line, but it's between trying to express yourself while negotiating reasonable emotional common ground (personal) and constantly trying to prove yourself while expanding your "turf" of opinions and beliefs as far as possible (professional), which is then confused in context when people operate in one mode in an environment that really fits the other. The complementary mode swap to the one you are talking about, are the crowd who argue non-stop in the Twitter replies of people who were just having a thought and not actually planning to become a Socratic philosopher. That is the consequence of treating every interaction like it's a task-focused meeting with implied rewards for whoever comes out looking like they were on the top of it.
Korean news agencies have been caught multiple times posting something inflammatory on social media just to report on it and cause outrage. The media have become literal outrage building machines.
I assume it isn’t limited to Korea and happens all around the world :(
The tabloid press sparking developments that it can then cover, is decades old at least. Things like giving cash to a celebrity who is well-known for drug or alcohol addiction, so that the tabloid can then write about the crazy bender that he goes on with that money.
Pretty interesting.
I find this idea on the internet that you can't be critical about anything annoying. I actually only run into this in online comment sections. People show up and start asking "why do you care", like we shouldn't be thinking about our actions and others and how they impact that world?
Also an interesting instance where marketing is why he is popular. I don't think the paintings and drawings stand on their own. I think most can achieve this level of skill with some dedication. Agree with the point about what sells is the whole package of reaction videos. Is it really art or just a new form of commercials to get followers.
> if one of the things you are selling is likability and good vibes, cheering on this kind of vicious reaction every time you get a review you don’t like is probably not a sustainable career path.
This is completely false. I might even say that it is wishful thinking. Some kind of "long arc of history bends towards justice" make-believe.
The contrary is almost certainly true: picking fights with well-selected made up enemies is an effective way to promote a brand that is based on virtue. It transforms an inactive/passive audience into an active participant in a movement. I would bet many of the people attacking this art critic wrote their first comment in defense of this artist. He subtly said "I need your help" and his audience reacted.
The art critic noted the manufactured TikTok videos, obviously planned by a media savvy PR team. Perhaps he isn't cynical enough to believe it, but this sustained and coordinated attack against him may well have been planned and orchestrated.
If this is actually the first time he's been criticized, the critic may be correct. If he starts getting more criticism and always reacts like a drama queen who has been terribly wronged and behaves very unprofessionally, the people who were fans because he was "nice" may start disappearing.
And that could hurt his bottom line. People there for the drama may not be paying customers. They may essentially be internet trolls.
> In fact, the only way I can understand Rodriguez’s incredibly thin-skinned reaction to my article is that he has managed to rise to this status of apex visibility without any kind of critical writing about him at all.
edit: oops I see in your other comment you quoted that part!
What's more amazing to me is that the artist doesn't even seem to understand what a critic _does_ - like what is the critic doing? He's not "gatekeeping" (what gate? the artist is famous, getting rich, and has a gallery show!) and not jealous or a 'hater'.
Like I understand that artists traditionally dislike critics, for obvious reasons, but usually they know the purpose of criticism. As the author says he is trying to both put the art in context of other art and to consider how social media figures into the art.
> And that could hurt his bottom line. People there for the drama may not be paying customers. They may essentially be internet trolls.
That's the magic of the "attention economy" - the people that get emotionally invested in the dramas surrounding you are better than "paying customers", because they check their brains out and switch to ingroup/outgroup mode - at which point you can sell them absolutely anything whatsoever. In contrast, paying customers are just annoying - they have opinions, and aren't going to give your person the time and sustained attention - the kind of following that both you and the platform you're on can effectively monetize through friction (i.e. continued ad exposure).
Right now this seems to be the generic recipe for printing money on social media:
1. Become an influencer and work at it until existing influencers treat you as one of their own;
2. Start engaging in the semi-regular, petty, totally not scripted fights with your fellow influencers;
3. Sign a deal for putting your name on some random bullshit commodity product, like idk. eyeliners or perfumes or makeup kits, and watch money roll in.
4. Optional: bonus points if you can turn that deal info a story of two influencers having a falling out over who gets paid for the bullshit product from point 3. You can milk that kind of thing for years, all the while selling your audience the same or different flavor of bullshit with your name on it.
Similar things happen between countries during wars. The only difference is that people die horribly instead of just sending mean messages to each other.
I agree. And I think the artist knows this, as he ended the campaign against the critic with a “I’ll teach you a lesson that love is better than hate” or something and asking his followers to follow the critic.
You forgot the second part of that post: "I think that's what he wants but doesn't know how to go about it". Which is, to me, clearly another jab at the critic, as if Ben is just trying get followers.
> The contrary is almost certainly true: picking fights with well-selected made up enemies is an effective way to promote a brand that is based on virtue.
I concur. Anecdotally, I see lots of content from TikTok creators replying to negative comments. At first I wondered why they seemed to be only amplifying negative responses instead of their fans, and then it hit me - those were the videos that did well (i.e. those videos got the most likes, views, shares). Showcasing a "hater comment" turns on the video viewers' tribal instinct. We want to side with the creator, to show the hater their place.
> And one easily disproven by the following of one Donald T.
That is not so. Donald Trump followers are not a static set. DT does lose and gain followers.
What might be true that some persona, no matter how disagreeable, will always have some followers.
Convicted criminals get love letters from strange women and all that.
If this artist continues in that way, most of his followers will come to consist only of people who are attracted by his obnoxious personality, without any connection to the works he creates. In the eyes of the world at large, he will just be that kitch-producing wanker with the idiot followers.
> Some kind of "long arc of history bends towards justice" make-believe.
I find it fascinating that you can look at the long arc of the moral universe and see it any other way. The only reason I can think of is that you’re staring at just the last few decades trying to discern a pattern, or even looking for the bend itself in the present. But if you take a step back and look at all of human history (and what we know about pre-history), how can you see it any other way?
I believe that long-arc moral ideas are debatable when applied to history. I personally don't believe it and unless we want to get into some deep discussion on history, politics and metaphysics we are unlikely to get anywhere. But I respect the position when applied in a correct context.
However, it is another thing to apply a supposed multi-generational trend, one that requires us to "step back" as you say, to the tactics of an individual playing the social media game. It's like the difference between the tide and an individual wave in the middle of the ocean.
Sure, if you look at the narrativized version of European human history the way we first conceived of it in the early Renaissance period, there's no other way to see it. It's called living at "the imperial core" for a reason.
World history just tends to be a bit more complicated than that and looking at history as a combination of "overcoming monarchy", "increased technical complexity" and "line goes up" might leave you with a limited view feeding into your pre-existing biases.
Not sure if a professional art critic and writer are willing risk their career and reputation for a tiktoker and some money, it's their job to be objective. It's also the wrong market, would any "serious" or snobby art collector buy the tiktoker painting? Likely be a hard no
It is possible but unlikely. Of course, the idea of the "heel" [1] is well-established. But I find it hard to believe someone with an established career as a sober art critic would volunteer for the kind of negative attention this brought.
I do believe that sometimes these kind of antagonistic partnerships could arise spontaneously. For example, the art critic may find his own tribe standing up for him. That may goad him into looking for a similar reaction from other art influencers in an attempt to forward his own career. However, that doesn't require coordination between them or conspiracy.
I’m sure the author, Ben Davis, must have had an inclination as to what he was going up against with Rodriguez but even if he didn’t, kudos for sticking it out with the fascinating followup.
When your subject is as famous for their tough street narrative as they are for their work then you can’t be too surprised if they feel obliged to react all hood in public. It’s a missed opportunity for Rodriguez though when he could have played his “stay humble my dude” card while… being actually humble. Is he a thug or not? Pick a lane.
The problem with existence as performance art is that we will never know if Rodriguez’ lashing out was genuine, or just another part of his rags-to-riches outsider story. At this level, his posts could just as well be coming from his PR team as from him at which point the furore and performance is definitely taking over from anything this guy does with a pencil. Is Rodriguez’ level of naivety and lack of self reflection evidence of this being his genuine self, or of his PR team’s perfectly formed ideal of how the Rodriguez phenomenon ought to be projecting itself?
The author perhaps implies, but doesn't outright state, what seems obvious to me:
Rodriguez got defensive and spread FUD about the critic because he was worried about being exposed as a phony. (At least as far as the surprise setups and "where does my talent really lie" aspect). Pretty simple and straightforward.
Most of those adoring followers probably know it in the back of their minds too, so defending him helps defend the shared illusion.
And using anti-gatekeeping as the righteous rallying cry is especially brilliant & effective. A good internet mob needs that SJW aspect.
The article is hidden with CSS (and apparently later shown with JS, but not shown at all if JS is disabled, and there is no indication of that), but disabling CSS or switching to reader mode helps.
Ben Davis should create his own art show, posting all the hate messages he got. He can call it “Conversations with Devon and his followers”
It can include an installation where a performer demonstrates all the threats on a Ben Davis effigy. “And here we have the performer shooting a flamethrower at a small model of Davis’ house as per hate message received on $date from ShadyFan23 on Facebook”.
An aside, but I doubt that he got many hate messages literally via Facebook. After all only boomers (defined as anyone over 30) use Facebook these days.
221 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 500 ms ] threadThe author posted a review of me on his blog. Not a review of my review. Of me and everything he could find out about me on the public Internet.
while an “unredeemable moron” might leave one star, that may not meet the bar for a response. while fighting with idiots on the internet is a past time, it is typically one entertained by… idiots.
a three star review, on the other hand. no, this takes thought. a thinker left that harsh judgement. a foolish thinker, but a thinker. thoughtful, but wrong, incorrect. flawed. no mere idiot, so it must be an asshole. and we can’t have that. justice must be preserved.
with a counter-review.
Also - mostly thanks to discord - it's trivial to summon an army of kids who are under the age of criminal responsibility who will do almost anything (online) if you kick them a few robux.
Shit, I’d put that on my resume probably.
It’s also the case that the popular mainstream has become conservative to the point of fascism where it comes to critique. Positivity denying its opposite. The responses from the artist were also strange and overlooked their own contradiction, as in “you’re just one person with one opinion” (but my followers are also single people with single opinions, all of which must be positive at all times).
The article here and the earlier article that triggered the social media kickback both assert that "the art" includes both the images and the staging and presentation on social media.
Much like <insert other famous artist> who made themselves an essential intertwined part of the <other famous artist> art show.
Yeah, the painting is boring, safe, well trodden material (and he's not good at hands!) but the phenomenon is social media. The hype machine. The parasocial relationships.
Seems like Rodriguez is more of a performance artist.
Of course there's plenty of counterexamples where the art alone was enough for fame. Esther and Van Gogh come to mind.
Remember, these are middle schoolers, at least mentally.
"You're one of today's lucky 10,000":
* https://xkcd.com/1053/
:)
See also the Theory of Chinese (Indian) Indifference: No matter how famous you are, not matter how notable your accomplishments, a billion Chinese (Indians) have never heard of you and couldn't care less.
Is there anyone else (alive?) today whose art is being enjoyed regularly by more people than this fellow?
That { individual | art collective } get the eyeballs but not the name recognition.
Think "Studio Ghibli" if you don't know who I mean. And if you don't know that, watch some of his movies.
There is a lot of art that is basically just crafts. Technically skilled and beautiful to many people who have been to a museum once or twice (and there are many of those!) — people are baffled by the fact that someone can paint realistically — ignoring a rich art history that should make clear that doing just that is the bare minimum and clearly not the point of good art.
But in the end all those works are more or less uninteresting beyond that. They lack the stuff that makes Mona Lisa's smile famous, the stuff that Hopper has in his pictures, the crows over the fields in Van Goghs paintings, Yves Kleins blue etc. If your art lacks the art while delivering technical skill it will still remain ultimately hollow. And if your ownly impact your art makes on the world is fighting your critics you should wonder why you are doing it.
In fact bad taste in art is equally common in the upper class. Just have a look at how Silvio Berlusconi's heirs are struggling to sell the stuff he considered art for example.
Being known doesn't mean you are exemplary of what you are doing. If you have a famous youtube tutorial channel for javascript, you might be one of the most widely known javascript programmers — but that doesn't automatically mean you are the "best" (or even a half-way decent) programmer. It still might mean that you are a stellar teacher and an exceptional communicator, which worth a lot, but if you confuse yourself for something that you are not this is where the problems start.
To the general public that guy might be what they think a good Javascript-Dev looks like, but ultimatly he isn't. I had to think of Bob Ross: A legendary communicator, a good ambassador for the arts and a good human being, but I wouldn't buy his art if I found it at a thrift store. But Bob Ross knew that his skill was being a communicator for the arts and didn't confuse himself with the painters who managed to get their works into the big art instutions.
Soldering SMD is something I can teach a non-electronic person in a few hours, for example. The hard part is knowing what to solder and when. Similarily learning to do the pure technical act of drawing or painting photorealistically can be learned. To paint motifs that are worth doing so and result in a "good picture" are something different entirely.
Maybe you have to take my word for it, as someone who in his life went through hundreds of art school applications, but there will be a difference between some abstract thing a person with true skill and talent did, and something your five year old neice did (nothing against her, maybe she has talent, who knows). Something being (seemingly, to the layperson) easy to copy does not mean that it is. Very often there will be much more behind the work than it seems on first glance. A lot of the very abstract stuff you will find in the museums for example was done in a time where nearly nobody dared to do this. So if your neice wanted to copy that, she needed to go back in time, grow up there and do it back when nobody did it. So yeah she could maybe do it. But she didn't.
When comparing abstract and concrete painting there is a lot to be discussed, but trust me when I say that people in the art scene probably look at art just in a different way that most people. Many people have misconceptions about art a la "what does the artist want to tell us" and then there is just a bunch of splashes on the canvas. The artist can sometimes be a trickster and the art understood from the context in which it was created. Sometimes art also just is and in a world where everything has to be about money, efficiency, entertainment, etc it can serve as a room of reflection with something that is beyond simple answers. I am not going to give a grand defense of abstract art here, I am not a painter and if I were it would probably not be purely abstract. Now historically painters went into the abstraction when photography came around, which could create the photorealistic image very easily. Nowadays photorealistic painters often just take a photograph and (like your neice), copy it to the pixel. That is of course a lot of work, and maybe there is even a bit of art or rebellion in that amount of work itself, but I find it more interesting when people pull out things from seemingly nowhere in their very own and unique ways.
But I am a musician and I work a lot with harsh noises many people hate to hear. I don't think there is any need for me to even attempt to defend what I like to do and so shouldn't painters.
I know people say this all the time, but I've yet to see anybody actually try. Pick some "famous pieces" and have your 5-year old niece try to reproduce them. I'm sure you (and she) will find there is a lot more to them than superficially meets the eye.
To non-software people the syntax is what seems impossibly hard and in their view writing a software that works, reliably is what should be easy. The truth is just the opposite. So to non-software people, someone writing Hello World in brainfuck would seem crazier than someone writing a good piece of software that solves a hard problem.
So judging the craft can be hard if you are not doing the craft yourself. A painter like Picasso could draw completely realistic at age 19 and spent the following decades doing more abstract things. Not because the realistic stuff was hard and he was lazy, but quite the other way around. Writing a complicated program with obscure syntax and many million lines is possible, but it takes a true master to do the same thing in a very readable, maintainable way, while making it shorter. Art can, at times, be very similar.
I enjoyed the Picasso museum in Barcelona and it was indeed eye opening to see his conventional but excellent architectural drawings ;-)
Ultimately this isn't that important, my point was rather about technicality. Technicality alone doesn't make a great master, just like syntax knowledge alone doesn't make you a great software engineer. But in coding the goal is typically to write good software and the criteria for good software are pretty clear — compared to what makes good art at least. Now as an artist you can totally suck at many things but be good at one specific thing that you did in a very specific and novel way and this alone can make the difference.
One could say with our subway painter that the special thing about him are not the paintings but how he medializes their creation. But just painting realistically is something many people can do, and many also can do better.
Indeed. Without wanting to disappear down a philosophical rabbit hole, I think you hit the nail on the head there.
It's all fake, but people are captivated by the story and suspend their disbelief.
Plenty of creators like him and I think his career will be a short one, but for now he gets to be the world's most famous bullshit storyteller.
It's accidentally a profound statement on how visual arts are seen by the general public.
I do question calling those art. Monochromes were absolutely not new when Klein does a blue one. That's already quite mediocre. But then he makes more of the same painting. How is that art?
A guy that paints walls for his job, isn't doing art, just because he holds a brush and paints a wall. But just because it is his job and it serves a function doesn't mean he couldn't create art when he paints a wall. In the end it is a lot about the mindset of the artist and how they are willing to involve others with that mindset.
I did not say anything about his role in society and whether it is okay to like him or not. It is. It was also great for Bob Ross for example to do what he did in communicating art: His paintings are not stellar examples of landscape painting, but he managed to inspire many people to go for the journey and that is worth a lot.
Subjectively, to me as someone who has a closer background to arts than most I find it lacks something — and that something might make all the difference between lasting love or forgetting him in a few years time. Other people might have differing opinions.
Think of any field you know something of. E.g. if you are in tech there might be some celebrity non-tech people see as a tech genius. But you know they are mediocre at best. That doesn't takw away from their ability to reach people, but it is not the same as being stellar in their field.
The art world as participating artists see it isn't the art world the rest of the world sees. These Tiktok people are to art what televised wrestling is to martial arts: very skilled people performing impressive feats designed for entertainment more than anything.
And I think that in this case,the critic was kind of a dick in his critic. In a very knowledgeable and eloquent manner he implies that if (from his perspective) the painter is not very good nor the art he produces, then the only explanation is that all the people who enjoys his art are gullible simpletons who don't know art. He has every right to have this opinion, of course, but he shouldn't be surprised if the gullible simpletons in question loudly disagree.
compared with say picasso or michelangelo or van gogh? jesus, the generation of ignoramuses that we are producing.
"who is the most famous artist in the world alive today?"
i might come up with david hockney - but not this git.
> Devon Rodriguez is almost certainly the most famous artist in the world, at least on one level. Almost no one I know has ever heard of him.
It's clear that the author means that in _popular circles_, he's very famous, but in _critical circles_, he's unknown. The author isn't trying to draw a comparison with Van Gogh. He's trying to make a statement about the changing nature of what it means to be a popular artist.
"Many millions" is a lot when compared to my popularity, but insignificant when compared to actually popular artists.
Like, HN is not a forum where art critics would be overrepresented, and it would be somewhat reasonable reflection "popular circles" and even one that favors an artist which, according to the article, draws heavily on younger and more app-using population than the general one. If we'd have a poll right here about artists people can name, do you really think that he would come out on top? Or even be in top 10?
It's actually kind of interesting. There's tons of living actors, authors, directors, and musicians that are household names on a global scale. But architects, painters, poets or sculptors? Everyone I can think of is dead.
Hockney, Hirst (even if he only moved into painting fairly recently), Kit Williams. But yeah I'm struggling to come up with a fourth.
> It's actually kind of interesting. There's tons of living actors, authors, directors, and musicians that are household names on a global scale. But architects, painters, poets or sculptors? Everyone I can think of is dead.
Architects I disagree with, but for the rest there's a lot more competition lately. Painting never really recovered its social standing after the rise of photography. There are a lot of alternatives to a poetry reading, many of them more enjoyable or at least more accessible.
Tracy Emin seems to be able to paint (she's better known for "installations"). But she's well-known, she's alive, and she's a painter.
That's perhaps a stretch; plenty of public figures have painted on occasion, maybe even sold a painting or two, but would not be considered painters.
I thought Picasso was all about revolutionizing art, until I visited the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, and saw his juvenilia. Then I realized that he was an extremely skilled draughtsman, anatomist and figurative painter.
I'm not keen on Tracy Emin, but I was mistaken to underestimate her.
It's music too.
The largest concerts in history according to Wikipedia belong to Vasco Rossi, Bijelo Dugme, and Glay.
Ever heard of them?
I suspect we're simply unaware of the marketing bias we're all walking around with.
That said, I've never heard of this person, but I'm probably way out of touch with popular art. When I think of popular living artists, I think of Dale Chihuly, Takashi Murakami, and Banksy.
ironic, considering it demonstrates that you havent even bothered to read the article before issuing your opinion
But perhaps similar interplay of the triangle of artist-fans-critic was already there a century or two ago, just on a smaller scale ?
Isn't Banksy the most well known artist these days?
yes, banksy is the most easily recognized, commercially successful modern art commodity object producer.
That's so 2010s. semi-/s
Elvis and the Beatles used to be some of the most well-known musical artists, yet how many people born more recently would be familiar with them.
"Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts." — Paul Simon, "The Boy in the Bubble"
HN is (very deliberately) my only social media other than what my friends send me.
I am not saying anything you don't already know by saying that parasocial relationships are so evil because they get the time that formerly would have gone into your real human relationships but don't give you anywhere near the payoff.
In many ways the genie is out of the bottle/Pandora's box is open but the attention economy might just be the most insidious technology ever invented.
How empty are these people attacking the author?
I do not know whether TV show plots belong in this list, but they might.
Just imagine you could take your SO to lunch or dinner for free*!
* requires 1000 2 minute ad breaks
I’ve seen Mastodon and Tumblr users post, “I’m sick of people saying I should spend time with my neighbors. They’re probably TERFs/MAGA/whatever.” (There may be analogues mutatis mutanda on other sites, I don’t know firsthand.) You’ll have a hard time convincing people that social walling-off is a bad thing when they have elevated it to a virtue.
This isn't entirely wrong-headed though, I think it's just a symptom of a society that's become too divided. If you want a healthy community of people living together in one place, they need to all share a common culture and ethical framework. In America these days, that just isn't the case, and you can't expect people to be buddies with people who happen to live close by, but have diametrically-opposed viewpoints and even view them as evil (for instance, the neighbor is a MAGA person and the person in question is homosexual).
Once you take on a person or idea as part of your core, any attack upon that person or idea becomes a VERY personal attack upon you, and the response is visceral and irrational (I suspect that it actually suppresses the higher functions of the brain). I've watched so many people come apart at the seams when one of their sacred cows were attacked, even becoming violent in some cases.
The only difference nowadays is the speed with which people can reach this level of reveredness.
Good point. Religion is the ultimate parasocia relationship.
edit: spelling
There is one other difference too: there's now an entire economy built around getting people to "this level of reveredness" for someone - doesn't matter who or why, the specific person or idea are not the point - and then pitting those someones against each other in dramas that are totally genuine and not at all unscripted. The point is to trigger and maintain this "visceral and irrational" response, because while in this state, the followers will happily buy pretty much any kind of high-margin, low-value garbage their favored online persona endorses, and they'll even feel good about it. It's a money printed machine.
I mean, it's one thing when people got angry over someone insulting the Pope, or the prophet Muhammad. It's different when you imagine Pope and prophet Muhammad were two besties, pitting their followers against each other, so they can sell them merch, raking in amounts of money they could've never get on their own. The latter is what's happening today, at scale.
> "What if he was your son??"
I mean ... what of it? It's the strange idea that the critic is 'attacking' the artist and making him feel bad for no reason. So this random stranger is trying to make the critic emphasise with the poor smol bean artist. It's very odd.
why is that "payoff", whatever that is, something to seek out and prioritize?
does it have to be about having "something to get"?
A well-known language learning blogger posted a review of a learning site (created by another blogger, with whom he had several disagreements). The review was generally positive, but the other blogger took undue offense to some of the criticisms in the review (which were laid out politely and accurately). He not only posted a snarky "review" of blog from whence the review sprang but his followers jumped in, castigating the reviewer in various online forums.
While I never expected corners of the internet to be a revival of Enlightenment-era salons, I'd hoped that they wouldn't be virtual pile ons. I'm naive ...
Me too, friend.
let’s just ignore them
Definitely feels like it based on that painters reaction.
TikTok is all about clout generation, if you're a content producer then you're used to positive feedback & I'm pretty sure TikTok's dark patterns will definitely involve promoting positive comments on your videos and burying negative ones.
They want you to have that Oxytocin feelgood rush again & again because...then you keep using their app!
They've already been found to do things like show Ukraine videos to Ukrainians but hide them from Russians, whereas Russians are shown cute cat videos and fake news about Ukraine. Pretty sure their dark patterns will include exactly that: find your demographic and push more of what you like, hide negativity and boost positivity within your bubble. Although most social media platforms are guilty of this; it's how they work.
What makes TikTok different? Well they've very clearly targeted a much younger demographic, I remember back in what 2017-2018 or so? Stickers with the TikTok logo but nothing else slapped onto utility poles, atms, etc in a guerrilla marketing move designed to capture a certain demographic. But it's also largely short form content - dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit. But it makes me wonder if it trains users to react with no long term attachment. See this dude's video, send a hate/death threat message, pop back into TikTok and move on to the next funi feelgood video.
Does consumption of shortform content have an effect on attention span/apathy?
Joking aside, the review doesn't feel over the top or unfair and given that any review is an opinion piece, it's the reaction that was way over the top.
I actually clicked into it expecting to feel like "Why is this on the front page of HN?" and I don't feel that way at all.
In fact, the only way I can understand Rodriguez’s incredibly thin-skinned reaction to my article is that he has managed to rise to this status of apex visibility without any kind of critical writing about him at all. It’s all just been feel-good profiles, so that the first critical word feels like a huge crisis. That’s a relatively new kind of situation for an artist to be in, and worth analyzing.
In addition to this, he more or less makes the point that Rodriquez is so famous because he cultivates a personal relationship to his audience or a "faux personal" -- a parasocial one -- and his fans are more invested in that than in his art per se. This is the opposite of how it usually goes in traditional art circles. Usually, the art comes first and then people become interested in the artist.
It's interesting to me because I've spent a lot of years trying to sort out how to have a "relationship to the public" -- a constructive one, a professional one. Women on the internet tend to attract a lot of drama and I've spent a lot of time trying to sort things out in a way that makes sense to me so I can try to get that down to a dull roar and I have found it helpful to see male-coded behavior as being about being raised to have "a real career," which boils down to a professional relationship to the public, to people who are not family and friends, and female-coded behavior as about personal relationships.
How do you make that professional versus personal distinction that this article touches on? How do you get people interested in your work instead of interested in some faux "personal" relationship to a woman they really don't know well but want to imagine they do for reasons I have trouble grasping?
And so this piece parallels some of my observations about gender issues. I think women get raised to have personal relationships and don't get raised to have professional lives and when we go online, we talk and behave in a way that is very personal. Other people hunger for that, want more of it, actively encourage women to do more of that and no one tells us "Honey, that's unprofessional" and if they do we tend to feel like "You're just a sexist pig trying to gatekeep me out!" and not like "Oh. I didn't realize doing X was a problem."
So it's interesting to me to see this piece and I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. I really expected this to be another internet "he said/she said" kind of thing and I'm blown away that it's not that at all and we need more of this type of analysis of how and why things sometimes go sideways on the internet. It's our only hope of having fewer such incidents.
I think the interchangeable parts era of tech work is nearly over and we're heading into something that will look more like highly paid roles in other industries. This could do a lot for gender equality[0], or maybe destroy it[1].
[0] Discrimination can work its way into randomized panel type scenarios because biases tend to show up in averages of first impressions more than they do in long-term relationships. That's why they use an "implicit bias test" that involves flashing pictures at you, and why the "I have female friends," argument is not taken seriously by anybody. What psychologists are telling us is that discrimination is maximized in the snap judgement scenarios posed by modern hiring processes.
[1] A network of long-term professional relationships that can't be unseated by anyone that isn't taken on as an apprentice literally describes the patriarchy.
It's a mental model I've found more helpful than just screaming about "sexism!" but I have no expectation it will ever catch on.
So for me it's been hard to say "This is personal and that is professional." Like either I'm trustworthy or not. Duh.
So it's not been obvious to me where to draw that line or navigate such.
I assume it isn’t limited to Korea and happens all around the world :(
Also an interesting instance where marketing is why he is popular. I don't think the paintings and drawings stand on their own. I think most can achieve this level of skill with some dedication. Agree with the point about what sells is the whole package of reaction videos. Is it really art or just a new form of commercials to get followers.
Yeah they're trying pretty hard to discourage that
This is completely false. I might even say that it is wishful thinking. Some kind of "long arc of history bends towards justice" make-believe.
The contrary is almost certainly true: picking fights with well-selected made up enemies is an effective way to promote a brand that is based on virtue. It transforms an inactive/passive audience into an active participant in a movement. I would bet many of the people attacking this art critic wrote their first comment in defense of this artist. He subtly said "I need your help" and his audience reacted.
The art critic noted the manufactured TikTok videos, obviously planned by a media savvy PR team. Perhaps he isn't cynical enough to believe it, but this sustained and coordinated attack against him may well have been planned and orchestrated.
And that could hurt his bottom line. People there for the drama may not be paying customers. They may essentially be internet trolls.
> In fact, the only way I can understand Rodriguez’s incredibly thin-skinned reaction to my article is that he has managed to rise to this status of apex visibility without any kind of critical writing about him at all.
edit: oops I see in your other comment you quoted that part!
What's more amazing to me is that the artist doesn't even seem to understand what a critic _does_ - like what is the critic doing? He's not "gatekeeping" (what gate? the artist is famous, getting rich, and has a gallery show!) and not jealous or a 'hater'.
Like I understand that artists traditionally dislike critics, for obvious reasons, but usually they know the purpose of criticism. As the author says he is trying to both put the art in context of other art and to consider how social media figures into the art.
That's the magic of the "attention economy" - the people that get emotionally invested in the dramas surrounding you are better than "paying customers", because they check their brains out and switch to ingroup/outgroup mode - at which point you can sell them absolutely anything whatsoever. In contrast, paying customers are just annoying - they have opinions, and aren't going to give your person the time and sustained attention - the kind of following that both you and the platform you're on can effectively monetize through friction (i.e. continued ad exposure).
Right now this seems to be the generic recipe for printing money on social media:
1. Become an influencer and work at it until existing influencers treat you as one of their own;
2. Start engaging in the semi-regular, petty, totally not scripted fights with your fellow influencers;
3. Sign a deal for putting your name on some random bullshit commodity product, like idk. eyeliners or perfumes or makeup kits, and watch money roll in.
4. Optional: bonus points if you can turn that deal info a story of two influencers having a falling out over who gets paid for the bullshit product from point 3. You can milk that kind of thing for years, all the while selling your audience the same or different flavor of bullshit with your name on it.
I concur. Anecdotally, I see lots of content from TikTok creators replying to negative comments. At first I wondered why they seemed to be only amplifying negative responses instead of their fans, and then it hit me - those were the videos that did well (i.e. those videos got the most likes, views, shares). Showcasing a "hater comment" turns on the video viewers' tribal instinct. We want to side with the creator, to show the hater their place.
Much more likely is that after a few cycles those still involved have made it part of their identity.
That is not so. Donald Trump followers are not a static set. DT does lose and gain followers.
What might be true that some persona, no matter how disagreeable, will always have some followers.
Convicted criminals get love letters from strange women and all that.
If this artist continues in that way, most of his followers will come to consist only of people who are attracted by his obnoxious personality, without any connection to the works he creates. In the eyes of the world at large, he will just be that kitch-producing wanker with the idiot followers.
It's either that he's very ignorant to how the internet works, or he has to say this for his own PR reason.
> The contrary is almost certainly true
You seem to be contradicting yourself.
I find it fascinating that you can look at the long arc of the moral universe and see it any other way. The only reason I can think of is that you’re staring at just the last few decades trying to discern a pattern, or even looking for the bend itself in the present. But if you take a step back and look at all of human history (and what we know about pre-history), how can you see it any other way?
However, it is another thing to apply a supposed multi-generational trend, one that requires us to "step back" as you say, to the tactics of an individual playing the social media game. It's like the difference between the tide and an individual wave in the middle of the ocean.
World history just tends to be a bit more complicated than that and looking at history as a combination of "overcoming monarchy", "increased technical complexity" and "line goes up" might leave you with a limited view feeding into your pre-existing biases.
I didn't know who the artist in question was before today, but now I've at least heard of them, so it appears to be working.
I do believe that sometimes these kind of antagonistic partnerships could arise spontaneously. For example, the art critic may find his own tribe standing up for him. That may goad him into looking for a similar reaction from other art influencers in an attempt to forward his own career. However, that doesn't require coordination between them or conspiracy.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heel_(professional_wrestling)
When your subject is as famous for their tough street narrative as they are for their work then you can’t be too surprised if they feel obliged to react all hood in public. It’s a missed opportunity for Rodriguez though when he could have played his “stay humble my dude” card while… being actually humble. Is he a thug or not? Pick a lane.
The problem with existence as performance art is that we will never know if Rodriguez’ lashing out was genuine, or just another part of his rags-to-riches outsider story. At this level, his posts could just as well be coming from his PR team as from him at which point the furore and performance is definitely taking over from anything this guy does with a pencil. Is Rodriguez’ level of naivety and lack of self reflection evidence of this being his genuine self, or of his PR team’s perfectly formed ideal of how the Rodriguez phenomenon ought to be projecting itself?
Rodriguez got defensive and spread FUD about the critic because he was worried about being exposed as a phony. (At least as far as the surprise setups and "where does my talent really lie" aspect). Pretty simple and straightforward.
Most of those adoring followers probably know it in the back of their minds too, so defending him helps defend the shared illusion.
And using anti-gatekeeping as the righteous rallying cry is especially brilliant & effective. A good internet mob needs that SJW aspect.
It can include an installation where a performer demonstrates all the threats on a Ben Davis effigy. “And here we have the performer shooting a flamethrower at a small model of Davis’ house as per hate message received on $date from ShadyFan23 on Facebook”.