carlagirl photo.

practicing the arts of cogitation since the late 1900s.

why i dislike the art world, and its coverage

Posted on | August 31, 2006 | 3 Comments

Isn’t it appropriate that the East Bay Express‘ cover story this week, “Hipster Invasion,” about the conflict of white hipster art scenesters invading a predominantly African American neighborhood in Oakland, is rather cluelessly mirrored by the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s cover story “Everybody wants Mission District painter Keegan McHargue,” which features a young white male “star” repping for one of the only predominantly ethnic neighborhoods in the city?

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3 Responses to “why i dislike the art world, and its coverage”

  1. adrienne
    August 31st, 2006 @ 10:41 pm

    yes!!! D knows how this sort of thing happened in santa ana too. i fucking hate hipsters, especially white hipsters.

    a really cool japanese blogger, Kei of Irregular Rhythm Asylum, wrote about this a new hipster’s club/store in tokyo run by a big apparel company. they promote themselves as the edgy center of the hip art scene and, in the process, commodify revolutionary/radical politics. hipster gentrification in tokyo. you can see the offending club here. when i went to the site, i “entered” and clicked on “special contributions.” they have this “in memory of section” image. along with che and pablo neruda and ho chi minh, they list angela davis as one of the “dearly departed”!! jerks and idiots. as kei put it in this post here, this is the kind of hipster commodity-spectacle that takes a living and working revolutionary and kills her. he also notes how they “pretty up” revolutionary images and sell them for a fortune. he ends the post with an exasperated, “wtf are we gonna do?”

    indeed. because we need to do something.

  2. MadameK
    September 1st, 2006 @ 7:10 am

    *groaning for too many reasons*

  3. lynnlinn
    September 5th, 2006 @ 12:23 am

    Mediocrity masquerading as revolutionary.

  • CARLAGIRL PHOTO was founded on 14 February 1999 by Carla Willliams, a photographer, writer, and editor, born, raised and heading back to (yea!) Los Angeles, California.

    It was established with two goals: to be able to make my own work widely available for free, and to make accessible my research about artists of the African Diaspora, especially photographers, and in particular women. As it developed it grew to also include GLBTQ artists.

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