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New York Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
So You're an Artist? How Many Followers Do You Have?
IT WAS A slow Saturday on the second-to-last afternoon of this past December's Art Miami, one of the city's longest-running art fairs, now eclipsed by the much flashier Art Basel Miami Beach. Ethan Cohen, a dealer with a gallery on West 17th Street in Manhattan, was sitting in his booth showing a sculpture by the Rhode Island-based artist Thomas Deininger called 'Macawll of the Wild' (2024). From head-on, the work appears as a realistic depiction of a blue-and-yellow macaw perched on a branch. But the piece changes as the viewer moves around it, revealing itself to be a perspectival trick — from the side, it's not a sculpture of a macaw at all but a seemingly random cluster of cheap found objects: unclothed dolls, a plastic palm tree, an action figure of Sulley from 'Monsters, Inc.' On closer inspection, the bird's tail is made of an unpeeled plastic banana, an orange bottle cap, a No. 2 pencil and a tangled tape measure, among other things. It was priced at $60,000, but Cohen had yet to sell it when a woman came by and shot a video of the piece. By the next morning, Cohen had numerous messages from people he hadn't heard from in a long time — a former assistant, an intern who'd worked for him a decade ago, a collector in Indonesia. The woman had posted the video on her TikTok account, @gabrielleeeruth, and 'somehow,' he told me, it 'tripped the algorithm.' Not only did the work quickly find a buyer but there were now hundreds of spectators at the booth, leaning over one another to shoot their own videos, so many that Cohen had to find somebody to handle crowd control to protect the art. It wasn't until his son, who's in his early 30s, suggested that Cohen check TikTok himself that he truly understood the magnitude of what was going on: The original video already had 16 million views by around noon on Sunday. By 3:30 p.m. it was up to 50 million. At 6 p.m., the fair was over and the video had 90 million views. The tally, as of this writing, is 118 million and counting. The sculpture by Deininger is part of a small but growing canon of art that, though not necessarily made for social media, is best understood through its reception there. At a time when A.I., pseudoscience and political misinformation have made us suspicious about what's actually real online, social-media art offers a kind of pared-down comfort. It's often literal, with little room for disagreement regarding its intentions. Yet in its conceptual ambitions or technique, it can seem just clever enough to make viewers say, 'Aha!' (rather than, 'My kindergartner could've made that'). Other examples include 2018's 'Love Is in the Bin' by Banksy, a painting that was timed to partially self-destruct following its sale at Sotheby's in London; Marco Evaristti's 2025 exhibition in Copenhagen, 'And Now You Care?,' in which the artist placed three baby pigs in a cage and left them to starve to death (someone set them free); and Noah Verrier's completely sincere paintings of junk food like a Taco Bell Crunchwrap. Marina Abramović's 'The Artist Is Present' is arguably the original viral moment for contemporary art, a 2010 performance in which Abramović sat in a chair at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for seven or eight hours a day and invited people to take a seat across from her for as long as they could manage. There was no Instagram or TikTok at that time, but it did inspire a Tumblr called Marina Abramović Made Me Cry — a collection of dozens of images of people doing just that as they stared into her face. On the surface, these works don't have much in common other than capturing the attention of the public. This is a genre of art that's often only as interesting as the response to it, which makes it especially interesting to the people doing the responding. In an interview, Deininger, 55, discussed how wild macaws are frequently poached in Miami, where they aren't protected. These deeper concerns were largely lost on the work's audience, many of whom, at least according to the thousands of comments on TikTok, came to the same confident conclusion: 'Now that's art.' A PIVOTAL MOMENT in the history of social-media art was the first show by Yayoi Kusama at David Zwirner gallery in 2013. Visitors waited for hours to see one of the Japanese artist's 'Infinity Mirror Rooms,' which Kusama, now 96, fills with mirrors and lights to give the illusion of boundless space. Instagram was still novel, with a just-introduced video function, and hordes of people lined up to claim some time in this seemingly optimal environment for selfies. 'The first time I ever posted on my social media was a Kusama show,' Hanna Schouwink, a senior partner at Zwirner, told me. By 2017, there were Kusama 'Infinity Rooms' at institutions around the world, with timed entries to accommodate the crowds. Kusama inaugurated a new era of art specifically catering to smartphone engagement. The conceptual artist James Turrell soon had a brief crossover moment on Instagram thanks to his 2013-14 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, when Drake (before his beef with Kendrick Lamar blew up) visited the exhibition and later used it as the inspiration for a music video. In 2019, when the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach, the work's sale for $120,000 made it onto CNN, an outlet generally uninterested in art fairs; when the piece was resold, with a different banana, at a Sotheby's auction last year for $6.24 million, it was international news. If there's an explanation for viral art, it's a tautological one, reminiscent of Don DeLillo's riff on 'the most photographed barn in America' from his 1985 novel, 'White Noise.' Why is it the most photographed barn in America? Because people keep taking pictures of it. Why do people keep taking pictures of it? Because it's the most photographed barn in America. 'They are taking pictures of taking pictures,' DeLillo writes. This poses a unique dilemma for artists in an industry that courts a mass audience while remaining generally suspicious of populism. The former New York Times art critic Roberta Smith believed that Kusama 'might be the greatest artist to come out of the 1960s' but was dismissive of the 'Infinity Rooms,' favoring her abstract paintings, which are virtually invisible on Instagram. There's always been a palpable disconnect between the high art celebrated by critics and the art to which the public pays attention. Consider Thomas Kinkade, the painter of twee cottages and gardens, who died in 2012, the same year Facebook purchased Instagram: He was, commercially, anyway, one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. In 1999, Robert Rosenblum, then a curator at the Guggenheim, said of Kinkade, 'He doesn't look like an artist who's worth considering, except in terms of supply and demand.' Social media has further corroded the boundary between popular and praised but, beyond that, it's also helped extend art world snobbery to the masses. Love is one way to go viral, as was the case with 'Macawll of the Wild,' but hatred is just as powerful. To quote one of the less unhinged replies to Cattelan's banana, 'This planet needs to get hit with a meteor and start over.' Social media may have given artists a direct outlet to speak to an audience without the backing of an institution, but it's telling how few artists have made work explicitly about it. (One exception is Amalia Ulman, whose 2014 series of Instagram selfies features a fictional character she created to critique the manners of the terminally online.) While Deininger said his prices have gone up since the fair in Miami, no serious artist wants to be pigeonholed as 'that person you saw on Instagram.' As Schouwink told me, 'I know a certain younger generation is very well versed in the medium of Instagram and happy to exist in that space. But I don't think that's a very long view. I wonder what will happen to all these brains that have this constant stimulus that doesn't lead anywhere.'
Miami Herald
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Rarely seen works shine in Purvis Young exhibition at Pan American Art Projects
It has been said and often that Purvis Young is to Overtown what Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring were to Lower Manhattan. Young's work draws deeply from the elements around him—in his surroundings, through street graffiti, and at his studio in a mostly African-American neighborhood of Miami—organically blending painting, drawing, and collage materials. 'For many years, people have called me all sorts of things to describe me as an outcast artist, a Black artist, a ghetto artist, the Picasso of the ghetto,' Young said in an interview for a publication for the Art Museum of DeLand, which in 2020 organized a retrospective. 'I just want to be called an artist. The only thing I've done all my life is paint,' said the visionary, self-taught American artist of Bahamian descent. Since his death at the age of 67 in April 2010, Young's work remains relevant. His tremendous ability to create an intense 'visual narrative' defines the context and history of his community, its struggles, its resistance and its spirit of resilience. Pan American Art Projects gallery is showing 'Purvis Young: A Vision of Miami's Cultural Identity,' an exhibition that pays tribute to the extraordinary legacy of Young. Curator Claudia Taboada's selection includes rarely seen works, which will be on view opening Saturday, Feb. 1 through Saturday, March 22, at the gallery's Little River location. 'The idea for this exhibition came from a desire to pay tribute to Purvis Young, who not only transformed Miami's art scene, but also captured the spirit and cultural identity of the city through his work,' says Taboada, curator of the show and director of Pan American Art Projects. 'Luckily we were able to bring together a selection of pieces that had only been shown once before: some in Art Miami's 'Wall of Peace' in 2007, or the 'Paintings from the Street' retrospective exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum in 2006,' she says. In addition to celebrating his work, the curator believes that the show essentially invites the public to reflect on the social and cultural dynamics that inspired him—and how these themes remain relevant in a global context—which undoubtedly makes the work transcend its temporality. 'What I admire most about Purvis Young is his ability to turn everyday and found materials into powerful visual content that reflected a profound critique of his reality. Aware that his voice represented his community, he took it upon himself to question racial segregation and the marginalization of women through his work,' says Taboada. One of the most significant accomplishments of the artist's legacy was his role in transforming the perception of street art, redefining its value and elevating it—even in contrast to what some in his time regarded as primitivist art. 'The art world no longer isolates self-taught creators like Young with labels like 'outsider' or 'naif.' Today, Young's spontaneous gestural reveries, painted on found surfaces, are discussed in the same terms and with the same respect for their intellectual content as the works of other artists, in the same terms and with the same respect for their neo-expressionist intellectual content,' says Adrienne Von Lates, a curator, scholar, and art advisor with Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Art History from Columbia University; Von Lates has also served as curator and director of education at MOCA North Miami and the Bass Museum of Art. She is also an adjunct faculty member at the College of Communication, Architecture, and The Arts at FIU. The exhibition at Pan American Art Projects, which features some twenty works from the collection of Martin Siskind—a close friend of the artist and custodian of a significant archive of his work—highlights Young's inexhaustible creativity and unique ability to work with multiple expressive media simultaneously. The artist used techniques such as painting, assemblage, and works made from paper and recycled materials. 'These pieces reflect his unique approach of taking advantage of whatever was available to him to create art, from doors and reclaimed wood to everyday objects such as lace, grilles, political banners, magazines and books, among others,' explains Taboada. According to the curator, the organization of the space and the dialogue between the pieces was based on first recreating elements of Young's creative environment. His Overtown studio (adorned with posters of his exhibitions), his ladder and lamp for painting, are all accompanied by audiovisual materials. 'The works were grouped by main themes (spirituality, social protest, everyday life) to highlight the connections between them and create a coherent narrative,' says Taboada. 'This arrangement allows the pieces to dialogue with each other, showing how the local issues that Purvis addressed connect to universal concerns. The exhibition is centered around the work 'Guardian Angel.' 'It is surrounded by the allegory of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, his Overtown neighborhood, the recurring figure of the pregnant woman and the horses that represent freedom,' explains the curator. The exhibition not only highlights the significance of Young's work but also serves as a testament to the unwavering dedication of Siskind, who supported his friend for over 20 years. 'Martin kept Young's creative fire going by making sure he had a pacemaker, a corneal transplant, dialysis and diabetes treatments, and a new kidney,' explains Von Lates. The scholar says that from his early years exhibiting hundreds of small paintings in Goodbread Alley, Young's ambition was to share his work with as many people as possible. 'His images were crying out to be savored by a large audience, not locked up in a warehouse,' says Von Lates. Most of the works in the exhibition have not been seen by the public since Young made them and entrusted them to Siskind, whose home has become a shrine to the artist, according to Von Lates. 'Visitors to this exhibition will be beguiled by images that look as fresh as the day they were painted. They remain forever 'Young,' ' she concludes. Young's show is accompanied by a collaborative exhibition titled 'Voices from the Edge,' which explores unfiltered creativity and the intersection between mental health and art. The parallel exhibit features works by Candice Avery, Jorge Alberto Cadí, Isaac Crespo, Sebastián Ferreira, Jorge A. Hernández, Ramón Llosa, Echo McCallister, Milton Schwartz, Carlos Stella and Misleidys Castillo, all artists whose creations have been shaped by their battles with mental illness. If you go: WHAT: 'Purvis Young: A Visionary of Miami's Cultural Identity' WHEN: Opens Saturday, Feb. 1 through Saturday, March 22. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. WHERE: Pan American Art Projects, 274 NE 67th St., Miami COST: Free INFORMATION: 305-751-2550 and RELATED EVENT: Running concurrently, the show titled 'Voices from the Edge: Collective Exhibition of Outsider Art' in collaboration with Juan Martin's NAEMI (National Art Exhibitions by the Mentally Ill), will spotlight important works by artists across its collection. This collateral presentation explores unfiltered creativity and the intersection of mental health and art. is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. 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